Saintly and serene. Insipid and sexless. Or even smarmy Marmee, depending on whom you ask. Her name summons up an unsettling gamut of reactions, none of them exactly flattering. Because somewhere between the page and the screen, Marmee became easy to overlook.

Adolescent readers tend to be spellbound by the March girls’ aspirations and high jinks, not the inner life of their mother (eye roll). And early movie adaptations, directed by men and catering to social norms of virtuous, self-sacrificing womanhood, rendered Marmee cloying and flat. It’s an association she still can’t quite shake — and that threatens to suffocate actresses in sticky sweetness.

Which is why her admission of intentionally suppressed anger in the newest Oscar-nominated adaptation “is so important, because it tells us about so many mothers’ experiences, but also about the real woman behind Marmee,” said Anne Boyd Rioux, the author of “Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of ‘Little Women’ and Why It Still Matters.”

That real woman was Louisa’s own mother, the long-suffering Abigail May Alcott. Born into Boston prosperity, she fell hard for Bronson Alcott, a penniless dreamer whose progressive visions of education and social reform mirrored her own. But Bronson, for all his charms, turned out to be a notoriously poor provider — abandoning her for long stretches without money or a permanent home while she raised four daughters as essentially a single mother.

The low point was Fruitlands, Bronson’s ill-fated utopian community (the rules: no heated baths, no animal products or labor, no sex). There, the men philosophized and then went traveling, leaving Abigail and her girls to harvest the crops.