My daughter loved a chapter-book retelling of the story as an early reader, but could never make it through Alcott’s original. I read it so often in middle school that the book-a pleasingly solid hardcover edition, bound in rough-woven blue fabric-could fall open to any page and I’d reread the rest from there. And though some feminists disparaged it in its time for concentrating on matters of home and family rather than imagining radical new social roles for women, Alcott’s semifictionalized autobiography has lived on as a strangely timeless feminist text.
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Its popularity led Alcott to write a series of sequels about the March girls’ married lives and the fates of their children, and helped to start a whole new publishing category of fiction written specifically for adolescent girls. Wildly successful upon its original publication as a two-part novel in 18, Little Women did indeed “confer importance” on its humble subject matter.
#Little women cast movie#
Set to roll out on Christmas Day, as crammed with gorgeous movie stars in luscious period costume as a fruitcake is with candied nuts and cherries, this is the kind of holiday blockbuster that would likely haul in the seasonal family crowd even if it weren’t hugely entertaining-as it is-and didn’t seal the deal on Gerwig as a major new filmmaking talent-as it does. Glad tidings for audiences who, like the book’s tomboyish protagonist Jo March, might be grumpily anticipating a holiday season devoid of pleasures: Gerwig’s first film since her solo directing debut, Lady Bird (she had previously co-directed a movie with Joe Swanberg), arrives as a present in itself. “Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,” begins the first line of Louisa May Alcott’s classic novel Little Women-words that can be seen in close-up, being copied out in looping 19 th century script, at one point (not the beginning) of Greta Gerwig’s very 21 st century adaptation. The Criterion Collection Just Entered a New Era
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