I never saw the 1994 version of Little Women, I think because I was on my year in Spain when it came out. Winona Ryder never struck me as anything like the Jo I'd imagined, so I was in no hurry to seek it out later. I'm not avidly against adaptations of books I've read and loved, and I wasn't such an ardent fan of the book that I'd avoid any version of it, but I think that's the reason I missed it altogether. I've certainly never seen any earlier one and Katherine Hepburn seems even more miscast to me, so I came to the newest one free of any preconceptions except the ones firmly embedded in my head.
Little Women was a book we had at home, a blue cloth-bound hardback on the shelf in the sitting room, imprint circa 1940, at least, bearing some ancient inscription from no relation at all. My mother kept telling me I'd like it, so I consciously avoided it for years. Eventually, driven by boredom, I took it down and decided I'd have to get at least halfway through before I could nonchalantly impress her by remarking that I supposed it was ok after all. I probably got through two chapters, and was willing to admit I was reading it. She probably did her best to not say "I told you so." All the Pilgrims' Progress parts were Greek to me (they still are), and the pickled limes and references to squashes - not a vegetable we had in Ireland in the 80s - also mystified me, but I forged ahead, well used to ignoring things in books I didn't understand.
My daughter, eleven now, is devoted to Emma Watson and therefore was well aware of the upcoming movie and eager to see it, so I suggested I read the book to her before it came out. Re-reading it after so long, I met the ghost of my former self at the turn of every page, recalling what I'd thought that first time, the sentences as evocative as smells or tastes of childhood. The girl I was then crashed into the mother I am now and reminded her that reading a book is anything but a static event. What you take from it depends on who you are, when you are, where you are, if this is your first time or your twenty-first. My experience of Little Women now, as I read it at the same moment and in the same room as my daughter hears it, is worlds apart from hers.
So of course everyone has different views on anyone else's temerity to interpret such a well-loved tome on celluloid (digital pixels, whatever it is nowadays) according to their own viewpoint. A version is a version, nothing more. There is no absolute truth, except the words on the page, which every reader is free and invited to see through the lens of their own selves. That's the beauty of books - they are simultaneously the entire picture that the author provides and still only a fragment of the picture that the reader divines. A film gives you too much, is far too specific as to every little detail, doesn't allow for nearly enough personal interpretation. It's one way of telling it, but it's not the story.
The next time my daughter reads it, or watches it, I hope and believe that her first experience of it, listening to me read it in her bedroom coming up to Christmas the year she was eleven, will come back and inform whatever new meanings her life brings to it each time. And that's worth something.