My sister-in-law confesses that she is nervous about the Greta Gerwig adaptation of Little Women, in cinemas from Boxing Day. In her family of women, the 1994 film starring Winona Ryder is a Christmas tradition; another version will, she fears, inevitably disappoint. Having just seen the new film, starring Saoirse Ronan, Emma Watson, Florence Pugh and Eliza Scanlen as the sisters Jo, Meg, Amy and Beth March, I assured her there was nothing to worry about. The rave reviews are pouring in, and to the universal acclaim I can add my own: this clever, spirited, witty adaptation is pure pleasure from start to finish. Furthermore, it serves as a timely reminder of just how feminist the original novel, published in two parts in 1868 and 1869, was.

“When I read it at 30 I couldn’t believe it, I felt like I’d never read it before,” Gerwig told the New Yorker. “I couldn’t believe how modern it was, how strange it was, how spiky it was. I’d allowed it to become this snowglobe of sweetness, and it was nothing like that. It was much more complicated.”

Lines that Gerwig has used from the original novel include the girls’ mother Marmee’s “I’m angry almost every day of my life” (of course she was, Gerwig has noted: she was a woman in the 19th century) and aspiring painter Amy’s insistence: “I want to be great or nothing.” Little Women is, essentially, a story about raising intelligent, ambitious, creative girls at a time when society consistently undervalued them, a fact to which the title specifically alludes. Heroine Jo desperately wants to be a writer but is under pressure to marry and improve her family’s fortunes. “Women have minds and souls as well as hearts, ambition and talent as well as just beauty, and I’m sick of being told that love is all a woman is fit for,” Jo says in the film.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Greta Gerwig. Photograph: Lia Toby/PA

It is ironic, then, that despite having produced one of the best films of the year, Gerwig has been snubbed for her efforts, dismaying many film critics. She was not nominated for a Golden Globe in the best director category, which this year, yet again, features only men. Nor was she shortlisted for best screenplay, despite having intelligently rewritten the story as a non-chronological dual narrative that switches between the sisters’ girlhoods and womanhoods, before she introduces a third narrative strain that erodes the boundaries between fact and fiction while commenting shrewdly on itself.

Look away if you don’t want spoilers, but Gerwig gives Jo a book. Alcott’s novel ends with Jo, having got married and become a mother, giving up writing and founding a school. In real life, Alcott became a famous author, writing later of her heroine Jo that “she should have become a literary spinster”. Gerwig blended the two narratives to create a sort of meta-fiction, gifting Alcott’s heroine the ending that she – and perhaps Alcott – were both prevented from writing (in the film, Jo is told by her publisher, in a guise that could equally be that of a Hollywood mogul, that “if the main character’s a girl make sure she’s married by the end”).

Perhaps it is Gerwig’s affinity with the March sisters, via the struggle to be a woman artist, that makes her adaptation of Little Women so good. Gerwig’s partner, Noah Baumbach, is also a director, and although their work together has involved collaboration and Baumbach has been vocal about her influence on his work, she has been consistently cast as his muse. Furthermore, Little Women gets to the heart of which stories continue to be perceived as important and worthy of intellectual inquiry and interpretation. This is why I sense that Gerwig may have anticipated the snub, and may even have baked its underpinnings into the text of the film. “It’s just about our little life,” says Jo, of the new writing she is producing. “Who will be interested in a story of domestic struggles and joys? It doesn’t have any real importance.”

“Maybe,” says her sister Amy, “We don’t see these things as important because people don’t write about them.”

We have come some way to reconciling the domestic when it comes to artistic and literary output, of accepting that stories in such a setting are human stories worthy of being told, even if the protagonists are female. (Because, while women are constantly required to imagine themselves from the viewpoint of a male character, men are rarely expected to surrender the default, and even when they are encouraged to do so will often be resistant.) We have writers such as Elena Ferrante to thank for this ever-increasing acceptance, though we must remember those who dispiritingly insisted that this anonymous author of world-class skill must be a man masquerading as a woman.

Little Women review – sisters are writin' it for themselves in Greta Gerwig's festive treat Read more

Women’s stories continue to be written off, to be denied the status of high art. Gerwig knows it, just as any woman who writes novels, or makes art or directs films knows it. Like Jo, you have to fight hard for recognition. I have no doubt that many men will refuse to go and see this film, but those who do, or who are press-ganged into it by excited daughters, will find it brimming with humanity. It is hard not to be moved by the “little women’s” ongoing struggle to be included in that category, or by the thought of all the little girls who will see it, this book I have loved since I was six and which has been reinvented for a new generation, that tells them: “What you want is valid and important.”

I don’t know when my sister-in-law will get a chance now: she has just given birth to a daughter. No doubt one day they will watch it together, and it will show her that her dreams and ambitions can be greater and more soaring than Louisa May Alcott, trapped in the 19th century and kicking against it, could ever have hoped.

• Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist