George P.A. Healy’s painting of an Albany heiress evokes the elevated social milieu visited — and ultimately rejected by — the eldest March sister, Meg (Emma Watson). “This is a good Meg reference, although I didn’t use any bonnets, because I don’t love bonnets,” Gerwig said. “I just don’t like ’em. I feel like I’m allowed to not do things I don’t like.” By design, Gerwig’s Marches feel a little out of time. Working with the film’s costume designer, Jacqueline Durran, she established the mainstream culture of Concord in the 1860s, and framed the March family in opposition to it. “I wanted them to come across as what they were, which was essentially a hippie family,” she said.

Louisa May Alcott’s Oeuvre

Gerwig’s script drew from Louisa May Alcott’s private letters, scholarship on Alcott’s life, and Alcott’s later novels, in which Gerwig spied even more modern heroines than the ones in “Little Women.” Though Alcott compromised her plots to appease the expectations of readers, “as the books went on, they became more and more like her life,” Gerwig said. A speech delivered by Alcott’s stand-in Jo (Saoirse Ronan) in the film is borrowed from Alcott’s 1876 novel “Rose in Bloom,” about a young woman who goes off to live (and spar) with her seven male cousins:

Women, they have minds, and they have souls, as well as just hearts. And they’ve got ambition, and they’ve got talent, as well as beauty, and I’m so sick of people saying that love is just all a woman is fit for. I’m so sick of it.

Gerwig added her own final line: “But I’m so lonely.”

‘Heaven’s Gate’