Greta Expectations

Greta Gerwig doesn’t remember reading Little Women for the first time.

- Lifestyle

“It must have been read to me,” she says when I ask for her earliest memories of author Louisa May Alcott’s classic tale of four girls imagining a world beyond their humble surroundings outside Civil War-era Boston. “I always knew who Jo March was,” Gerwig continues. “She was the person I wanted to be.”

In that, Gerwig has had plenty of company. Little Women is one of the most popular books in the history of American letters; after the first volume sold out its initial run of 2,000 copies in 1868, the novel has never been out of print. Simone de Beauvoir, born in 1908, pretended as a child that she was Jo—Alcott’s protagonist and stand-in, a determined, stubborn tomboy with a flair for writing. Ursula Le Guin said that Alcott’s Jo made writing as a girl feel possible. In the film, Katharine

Hepburn played Jo in 1933; Winona Ryder, in 1994. Now, Gerwig has created her own Jo for the screen in Saoirse Ronan, who also starred in Gerwig’s debut as a solo director, 2017’s Oscar-nominated Lady Bird.