Little Women – the greatest sister act of them all
A century and a half after it was written, Alcott’s classic is still such an accurate depiction of sisterhood, says Hannah Betts
Something wonderful is happening. No, not Christmas festivities, but a reawakening of sisterhood. For the latest cinematic adaptation of Little Women is about to be released, directed by Hollywood darling Greta Gerwig. Gerwig’s adaptation stars Emma Watson as sensible Meg, sparky Saoirse Ronan as Jo, Eliza Scanlen as doomed Beth and Florence Pugh as snooty Amy. Laura Dern is protofeminist Marmee and Meryl Streep is beloved battleaxe Aunt March.
Waif lust object Timothée Chalamet plays Laurie, aka The Boy Every Woman Adores. We also get the dashing James Norton as John Brooke and heart-throb Louis Garrel as Professor Bhaer.
Still, it’s not the men that matter, obviously. Instead, sisterhood is the thing: the ups and downs, the bonding and the bitching; the way in which you can hate your sibling one minute, then risk your life to save her when she crashes through thin ice the next. As the trailer announces, the point of the film – and Louisa May Alcott’s deeply cherished 1868 bestseller – is “Meg, Amy, Beth and Jo”, albeit not necessarily in that order.
Because, of course, every reader for the last century and a half has wanted to be Jo – even when they patently bear a closer resemblance to one of the other March girls. My own sisters, Victoria and Florence, will persist in identifying with her, even when the true identity of the Betts incarnation of this stroppy, domineering, tomboy journalist is clear. I mean: Daddy’s girl, the less pretty one, determinedly single until she isn’t? Short of tattooing “JM” across my forehead, I’m not sure what else I can do.
I discovered the book, aged eight. Despite being separated by 100 years and the Atlantic Ocean, Little Women’s depiction of the sisterly dynamic felt instantly applicable to my own Birmingham existence. Victoria is 15 months younger than me, Florence seven years. We also have two brothers. But, for a long time, it was the girls who dominated – a flurry of hairbrushes, pinafores and Start-Rite sandals.
I was the shouty, socially awkward one, forever rebelling and losing her rag. Vicky was more like Meg: popular, the looker, less frenetic. Not that she couldn’t prove annoying, obviously. When my parents brought her home from the maternity hospital, she acquired a large scratch across her face that had not been present when they placed her next to me. She claims that her first memory is me clutching her by the throat.
At first, Flo appeared to be like gentle Beth, and we shared a tender bond over stories, ideas and history. Later, in my 20s, she in her teens, she morphed into Amy, and our relationship became spikier; the similarities that had drawn us together now dragging us apart.
This is where Alcott excels, capturing the great bunfight that is sisterdom: the solidarity and the claustrophobia, scrapes shared and scraps endured. She understands the plait-yanking jealousy one can have for she who is nearest to you in genes and gender, yet could not be further away in character.
And, then, there is the stomachchurning, all-engulfing panic when this magnificent, infuriating creature attaches herself to some flawed individual who is simply not good enough for her – see Jo March fretting over her Meg’s beau, John Brooke. Such moments marked the greatest traumas of our young womanhood. I lost sleep over their horrific boyfriends, as they fretted over mine.
Sisters are a universal fascination extending back to humankind’s first attempts to express itself: witness the
Torah’s Rachel and Leah, or ancient Greece’s Helen and Clytemnestra. Real life has given us loving pairs: the affectionate Jane Austen and Cassandra, say, or Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. But it has also given us savage ones: viz. Hollywood’s Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine; or sparring writers Margaret Drabble and AS Byatt, the latter remarking that, even aged 10: “I always felt as though somebody were sort of breathing on my heels.”
Sisterly twosomes have long been fictional confidantes and foils; from Dorothea and Celia in Middlemarch to Fleabag and Claire. Still, nothing beats a sibling posse for the sheer magnitude of feuds and escapades – think the Brontës, Pankhursts, or Mitfords. Wh Which is why those fictional girl gangs, the Bennet and March sisters, have suc such a permanent place in our hearts.
Y Yet where Pride and Prejudice can ma make an only child feel relief at being a lone lo wolf, Little Women can make he her cry out for sisterly companions. On One fortysomething without sisters tel tells me: “Prior to reading Alcott I felt pr pretty smug about being the apple of my parents’ eye. After it, I felt bereft. Ho How could I define myself without sis sisters to define myself against?”
And it’s true: being Hannah is made clearer by not being Victoria. I got to be bookish because she was arty; she sulky where I was forever furious. While Florence became a girlie girl, I ran a wild. If Alcott’s family dynamic
‘How could I define myself without sisters to define myself against?’
feels real, that’s because it was. Anna, her married sibling, was the basis for Meg. Lizzie, who died at 23, was the inspiration for Beth. The bullish May became flouncing Amy. Alcott recreated herself as Jo, refusing to correct readers who addressed her as such.
Little Women was an immediate critical and commercial success. Hence the follow-up volume a year later in 1869, billed as Good Wives in Britain. This was a publisher’s title, unlikely to find favour with its author – or any 21st-century woman, for that matter. One can’t imagine Gerwig, who draws deeply on this second tome in her film, using the original name. For the March sisters are more – so much more – than the gendered roles society ascribes to them; individuals with vocations, not passive dolts. They earn money, respect, and learn how to find satisfaction in their private lives.
They may end up settled, yet traditional wedlock is never the goal.
Gerwig’s Little Women is the eighth filmed version since Alcott’s novel was published. Such is our fascination with sisters – and the March sisters in particular – that every generation needs a retelling of this, the most wonderful sister act of all.