March goes off to war in Little Women, but Alcott was actually the veteran of her family.) The path from death and disease to popovers and petticoats can’t have been readily apparent to anyone-least of all to Alcott herself unlike Ronan’s determined Jo, marching with bluster into her publisher’s office, Alcott initially balked at Niles’s suggestion.

Though she had recently assumed the role of children’s magazine editor, she was best known for Hospital Sketches, an epistolary account of her experience as a volunteer nurse in the Civil War. In 1867, Thomas Niles of Roberts Brothers wrote to Alcott encouraging her to write a “girl’s book.” At the time, Alcott wasn’t an obvious choice for a marketable children’s author. In many ways, Alcott’s road to publishing was more extraordinary than Jo’s, and it’s worth unpacking Gerwig’s decisions, which draw from the literary experiences of the two women. In fact, Gerwig has stated in multiple interviews that she drew inspiration from both the novel and Alcott’s life, creating a meta-narrative of a novel that is already quite self-referential. In these scenes, Gerwig references Alcott’s own experience bringing out her novel in the competitive 19th-century American literary market. It’s thrilling to see the historic Roberts Brothers publishing house richly imagined in the film’s first scene and to watch Jo spar with her editor over the rights to her novel and its ending. Readers who haven’t seen Little Women may wonder at a Hollywood film that would let such dry topics take up valuable screen time, but the results are surprisingly cinematic. Gerwig’s interest in the novel’s creation extends beyond the physical book to the world of publishers, editors, and even copyright. Brushing off the extra gilt shavings, he hands the first copy to the proud author. In the final moments of the film, he lovingly stamps the title on the cover in gold: Little Women by Jo March. A binder takes the freshly printed signatures and sews them into a text block, rounds and backs the spine with a hammer, and binds the text in red leather. Jo watches from the sidelines as a printer sets her words in type and prints the novel on a beautiful iron handpress. Gerwig’s love for the novel is evinced at the film’s conclusion with a montage of the book’s production. AC85.Aℓ194L.1868 pt.1 (A), Houghton Library, Harvard University (printed with permission) A first edition of Little Women shows just how closely the film hewed to the real production of the book.

Little women publishing