Gillian Armstrong’s 1994 Little Women movie goes so far as to have Gabriel Byrne’s Bhaer bring Jo a tray of coffee and flowers as she writes and offer her advice on what kind of murder weapon would be best for the story she’s currently working on. He also becomes less harsh toward Jo’s writing: Heidi Thomas’s 2018 Little Women miniseries, for example, includes a scene in which Bhaer apologizes to Jo for criticizing her.

Most contemporary versions of Little Women, contra Alcott’s description of the professor as a middle-aged man who is both “rather stout” and also “plain and odd,” have cast Bhaer with a young and attractive actor. Laurie’s marriage to Amy generally gets glossed over as quickly as possible, while Bhaer generally gets transformed into a palatable romantic hero. Little Women adaptations have struggled to provide satisfying answers to those questions, and generally they do so by working hard against the grain of Alcott’s writing. Why would Louisa May Alcott do such a thing to Jo? Why would she do such a thing to us? And the character readers expect Jo to end up with, her charming best friend Laurie, marries Jo’s least favorite sister Amy instead.Īnd so, while generations of readers have loved Little Women and sighed over Little Women, they have also puzzled over that bizarre, unsatisfying ending. The end of Little Women sees its heroine, tomboyish and ambitious Jo, married off to the pointedly unromantic Friedrich Bhaer, a middle-aged and unattractive German professor who disapproves of the sensational stories she writes. But Greta Gerwig’ s take on Little Women, out now in theaters, is the first adaptation of the book to truly solve that problem - and it does so by leaning into everything fans dislike about those marriages, and amplifying it.

The insurmountable problem with Little Women - the one that’s had its fans in fits ever since its second volume was published in 1869, that every Little Women adaptation wrestles with - is that its climactic marriages are so profoundly unsatisfying.

Little women & good wives