My granddaughter loves to read so I recently gave her a copy of Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. I read it a number of times as a kid. So did my mother. So did my daughter. We all loved it! My granddaughter is in the middle of it and said that it’s a great book. Why do I mention it? Because it’s December, and the movie Little Women was premiered in December 1933. My mother actually saw it with her cousins–for five cents each in those days. I saw it on TV, and it was on every year around Christmas time for years. (It’s still on Turner Classic) The film is extremely faithful to the book, which doesn’t happen that often.

Louisa May Alcott was born in 1832. Her father was a headmaster of a school, and she was taught at home. However, her father had financial difficulties, and she needed to help provide for the family. At the same time, she wanted to be more than a wife and mother, and became a writer. Her first book, Flower Fables, was published in 1852. During the Civil War Alcott, an abolitionist, became a volunteer nurse in the Georgetown, D.C. Hospital. In 1863 she published Hospital Sketches, based on her time in the hospital, and from which she gained serious critical approval. Her “big break” came in 1868, when her published, Thomas Niles, asked her to write a book about girls. Alcott was not thrilled with the suggestion, but agreed to give it a try.

It took just a few months for her to write a semi-autobiographical novel based on the lives of her sisters and herself, known as Little Women. It immediately became both a critical and mass-market success. She quickly finished part two in 1869. She followed that with Little Men in 1871, about her life at the school which she founded with her husband. What Alcott had thought would be a simple book for girls just entering maturity became so much more. It has been read by millions of people in more than 20 countries, and not just by teenagers but people from 7 to 70. Rather than a simple romance, she spoke about the serious issues the March girls–Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy–dealt with. She discusses genteel poverty, war, the death of a sister, rivalry between sisters, and the ability and desire of women to work outside the home. What Alcott and her publisher thought might be a flash in the pan turned out to be a much-loved book for the past 150 years.

Little Women was adapted for Broadway in 1912 and in London in 1919, with a number of revivals in 2011, 2014 and 2019. Silent films showed the story in both 1917 and 1918. Then came the Talkies. The first one, and in my opinion the best one, premiered in 1933, where a young Katherine Hepburn played Jo, the main character. They were followed by other movie versions of Little Women in 1944, 1949, 1994 and 2019, as well as TV series in 1950, 1958, 1970, 1978 and 2017.

It’s been a bad year for all of us. In some ways it’s been very similar to that which the March girls went through. It’s rare that there’s a story which is both escapist and extremely relevant at the same time–this is one of them. If you’re not into reading, take a look at the movie. Or maybe do both.🤓