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Little Women: the book vs. the movie

Little Women (2019) — Greta Gerwig's film · Little Women (1994) — the Winona Ryder classic

Read first, or watch first?

Read first if your reader can manage it, for a concrete reason: the films give away the two turns the book spends hundreds of pages earning, Beth's story and the answer to Jo and Laurie. For the film order itself, the 1994 version tells the story straight and makes the better introduction; Gerwig's 2019 film rearranges time and rewards someone who already knows the book, which makes it the perfect one to watch after. This is a long book for strong readers, and the movies are a fair companion for a middle-schooler working through it.

What the movie changed

Gerwig scrambled the timeline

The 2019 film cuts between the sisters' childhood and their adult lives, and it plays with the ending in a way that assumes you already know it. It's a beautiful film about the book, more than a telling of it.

The childhood got compressed

Both films race through the first half, which in the book is a year of plays in the attic, the Pickwick Portfolio, and small domestic disasters. That's the half kids actually live in, and on screen it goes by in minutes.

Professor Bhaer got a makeover

Alcott wrote Jo's professor as older, poor, and unglamorous, on purpose; she was refusing the romantic ending readers demanded. Every film casts someone handsome and undoes the refusal.

Beth became a subplot

Films have to budget her story in scenes. The book gives Beth a whole quiet life, which is why her chapters have made generations of readers cry and the movie versions mostly don't.

What only the book has

The Pickwick Portfolio

The sisters' homemade newspaper, printed in full, fake advertisements and stern letters to the editor included. It's the book at its warmest, and no film has ever had time for it.

A year of small chapters

Camp Laurence, the valley of humiliation, Amy's pickled limes at school. The first half is episodic comfort reading, one small complete story at a time, and it's the part the movies sacrifice first.

Jo's writing career, in full

The sensation stories, the pride, the criticism that stings because it's right. The book follows the whole apprenticeship, not just the triumphant ending.

Alcott's voice

She talks straight to the reader, moralizes, teases her own characters, and confesses. The period piety is real and worth discussing, but the warmth underneath it is the thing families remember.

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