Last fall I was privileged to teach a fiction-into-film adaptation course that studied just one work of fiction: Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. I’ve taught Little Women as a case study in adaptation for many years, but always as part of several case studies in a course, never as the sole focus. Last fall, it was Little Women and only Little Women, so there was more time to analyze the novel in detail as well as to analyze the four main sound-era film adaptations (1933, 1949, 1994, 2019) and a couple of TV adaptations as well (a BBC production from 1970, and a US television production from 1978). We were very fortunate to have W. W. Norton & Company’s beautiful and reasonably priced The Annotated Little Women as our textbook–and to have the senior editor at Norton, Ms. Amy Cherry–come to class via Zoom one day to talk to my students about book publishing, Little Women, and careers in editing and production. Special thanks are due to the world’s greatest publishing sales rep, Ms. Mary Helen Willet, who encouraged me all the way and connected me with Ms. Cherry.

It was truly magical to spend the entire semester immersed in one novel and its many transformations into cinema and television. For me, and for most of the students, Alcott’s novel became a true companion, and each adaptation another chance to encounter Alcott’s vision or, inevitably, ways in which Alcott’s vision was altered or even traduced as it was prepared for yet another audience.

As is often the case, I am both thrilled and frustrated by the first time I teach a course. There’s an undeniable energy in that first attempt, and sometimes even the panicked moments yield surprising insights (and insightful surprises). The second time, of course, I have a chance to address my mistakes from the first time, which also trying hard not to fix something that was not in fact broken. You’ might think I could tell the difference pretty easily and consistently–but you’d think that only if you’ve never tried to teach a course.

Little Women is not a perfect book; those books don’t exist, of course. But it is, I think, a kind of foundation-book, an eerily powerful vision, a book full of love, full of compromises, full of contradictions, full of the strangest and most exhilarating and most powerful experience most of us will ever have: the experience of family.

I’ll be teaching the course later this year, this time as a summer course. To be honest, I can’t wait.

Here’s the course description:

ENGL 385 Fiction into Film: The Ongoing Legacy of Little Women

President Theodore Roosevelt said he “worshipped” Little Women. Simone de Beauvoir reported she “identified … passionately with Jo” and “shared her horror of sewing and housekeeping and her love of books.” Cynthia Ozick said she read Little Women “ten thousand” times. Barbara Kingsolver insisted, simply, “I, personally, am Jo March, and her author Louisa May Alcott had a whole new life to live for the sole pursuit of talking me out of it, she could not.” Camille Paglia, in a dissenting opinion, stated that “the whole thing is like a horror movie to me.”

The curated fanfiction website “Archive of Our Own” contains 433 works in the Little Women series.

And the most important statistic for our purposes in this course of study: Little Women has been adapted for film or television over 20 times, from 1917 to 2019.

It’s hard to think of another American novel, or of any novel at all, that has such a long and influential legacy in film and popular culture.  Its author, Louisa May Alcott, dismissively referred to Little Women and its sequels as “moral pap for the young.” Yet the book is still read, and movies are still made of it, and each new adaptation teaches us something not only about strategies of literary adaptation but also, and crucially, something about the role of women in the cultural context in which Alcott lived and in which each of the adaptations was undertaken.

Together we’ll read and analyze Alcott’s novel—as art, as biography, as fantasy, as feminism, as livelihood—as well as its many adaptations, with an emphasis on the 1933, 1949, 1994, and 2019 cinematic adaptations. In addition to a final course project, we’ll use reflective blogs, a discussion forum, and online annotation to explore the literary, cinematic, and cultural phenomenon that is Little Women.

Here’s the course trailer I made for last fall’s offering. I hope you enjoy it.