I was seven years old, in 1994, the day that the Little Women adaptation of my heart was released. It’s still a frequent flier in the Monaco household, as a Christmas film, even though much of the hundreds-of-pages-long novel doesn’t take place at Christmas at all. It does, however, start at Christmas, as the adaptation did, and so, this Christmas (which I recognize is nearly a month ago, now – Jesus, where does the time go?) I finally sat down to read it.
Seven-year-old me would be astonished and mortified that it took me nearly 30 years to actually read Louisa May Alcott’s work in its original, but she would be delighted to learn that I loved it just as much as I always expected I would.
The fact that the adaptations of Little Women remain so true to the original text (and I’ve seen all of them, save the most recent) are part of what made my first time reading this book quite a bit more akin to returning to an old friend: the love shared by sisters, the image of the perfect American family in wartime. But there are elements, too, that I might not have picked up on, then. I know now, for example, that Alcott was long pressed to pair up Jo and Laurie, and that, in deep frustration, she created the character of Professor Bhaer because her editor wanted the heroine married off and secure. I know, too, that Alcott’s father was a bit of a fanatic, and that many of his religious beliefs are threaded through the book, as Alcott herself parsed them via fiction.
Little Women was a work I added to my list of twelve classics I hoped to read in 2021 back in the winter of the year before, and while I didn’t make good on the entirety of my goal (five of the twelve!), I’m glad this was one of the ones to rise to the surface.