BY THE TIME SHE WAS DONE SHOOTING last December, Gerwig was six months pregnant, though her cast and crew did not know that at the time. “I didn’t really intend for it to be that way,” Gerwig said. “It’s just that at the beginning, you don’t tell anyone. And then at some point, I realized, ‘Well, maybe I’ll just make it to the end, and no one will know.’ And then I did.” In the spring, she delivered her rough cut to the studio, and 24 hours later, she went into labor. “The baby was like, ‘All right, let’s do this,’” Gerwig said.

In late October, Gerwig arrived at a New York preview screening of “Little Women” for a crowd of journalists and critics and Alcott scholars. She stood awkwardly in the aisle, and a receiving line formed in front of her, everyone eager to grab her hands and touch her shoulders and pay their respects. “I feel like I’m at my wedding, for my movie,” she said, and then she slouched to the front of the room to introduce the film. “As a girl, my heroine was Jo,” she said. “As a woman, it’s Louisa May Alcott.”

As she spoke, I noticed she was wearing a ring on the ring finger of her left hand. I watched her film, I cried, and then I went home and scanned her recent press photos for the ring. It had materialized several months ago and hadn’t left. Some of the images were attached to tabloid reports of the “secret baby” she’d had with Baumbach, whose own film about art and relationships, “Marriage Story,” is due in November . I guess I, too, was eager to know whether my heroine would be married by the end. That night, when Gerwig was out walking her dog, Wizard, she called me, and I asked her questions about directing movies, and then I said:

“So are you married?”

“Oh, no,” she said. She laughed.

I had noticed she was wearing a ring , I said.

“Yeah, that’s a — that’s true, but — yes — no, but I’m not married,” she said. Then she added mischievously: “Yet.”