IT is one of the most enduringly loved books that finds favour with each new generation. Now Little Women is returning to the silver screen once again with a new all-star adaptation in cinemas on Boxing Day.

Who’s in the new movie?

Meryl Streep and Laura Dern head-up the latest movie version of the classic American novel, that also features Emma Watson and Saoirse Ronan.

It’s not the first time it’s been on the big screen?

This is in fact the eighth film adaptation, with previous reworkings including a TV mini-series in 2017 starring Maya Hawke that aired on BBC One, a 1994 movie, starring Winona Ryder, Susan Sarandon and Christian Bale, and a 1933 film featuring Katharine Hepburn.

The new movie’s already a hit?

It has been critically acclaimed in the United States, with the American Film Institute declaring it one of the top 10 films of 2019 and the Hollywood Foreign Press granting it two nominations for the upcoming Golden Globes, including Best Actress in a Motion Picture for Miss Ronan, who plays the main character, Jo March.

It's a true story?

Author Louisa May Alcott was inspired by her own childhood, as the semi-autobiographical Little Women tells the tale of the impoverished March sisters, Meg, Beth, Amy and Jo who live with their mother in New England while their father is working as a pastor in the American Civil War. Pressured by their aunt – played by Streep in the film – to marry rich and be looked after, it documents their struggles to carve out their own lives.

She based Jo on herself?

Miss Alcott’s passionate, aspiring writer heroine is considered to be a fantasised version of the author herself, who wrote Little Women when her publisher requested she write a “girls’ book”, seeing her imagine her family’s story as she would have liked it to be. Children’s book editor, AnitaSilvey, said: “She really softens the hard edges of her life. She makes Jo a much more lovable, accepted character than Louisa May Alcott herself ever was."

So she had written before?

Under the pen name of Flora Fairfield, she had written short stories, poems and children’s tales since 1851, before using the nom de plume of A. M. Barnard later in life to write sensational thrillers and mysteries. She began to publish under her own name in the early 1860s.

But it was Little Women that established her?

Published in 1868, it finally cemented her literary reputation, selling out its initial run of 2,000 copies and has never been out of print since then.

The reason for its enduring popularity?

Greta Gerwig, US director of the new movie, thinks the protagonist’s popularity plays a part. She said: “Jo March was such a beacon for so many women of so many different generations - everyone from Simone de Beauvoir to Patti Smith to J.K. Rowling to me, we loved Jo March because she wanted to be bigger than the world would allow her to be."

MAUREEN SUGDEN