Little Women, episode one review: a sweetly nostalgic return to a well-worn classic

An America at war with itself. Women stepping into the spotlight to demand change. No, it's not the year in review, it's Little Women, BBC One’s bonnet-laden adaptation of the novel for girls by Louisa May Alcott.

First published in 1868, the classic coming-of-age tale follows four adolescent girls trying to find their place in the world while they wait for their father to return from the civil war. If there was anyone who could make this grip rather than cloy, it was Heidi Thomas, the screenwriter who kept us rapt through six series of Call the Midwife.

The challenges she faced, however, were significant. Rather than the drama of new life in every episode, there were smaller vicissitudes to work with: singed hair, a lost glove, sibling squabbles as the convincingly petulant Amy (Kathryn Newton) burnt the manuscript of her sister Jo’s (Maya Hawke) book. Even with Thomas's crisp script, it was easy to fall into a sort of post-Christmas stupor, jolting upright when Amy fell into an icy pond, before relaxing again to bask in the bonnets.  

The themes of the novel are so universal it has never been out of print, though last night's drama still felt like a trip to a strange and picturesque place. It was a glimpse of Christmas without Amazon orders, of teenage life without snapchat, when home entertainment meant sketching and playing the piano, not staring at screens. Nostalgia is a longing for whatever is missing from our times, and this production serves it up stylishly, dusting everything with snow and innocence.

Like any decent period drama, it also ticked off a few good tropes. We had a headstrong heroine in the form of Jo, zestfully played by the daughter of Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke, who felt that tears were “an unmanly weakness,” kept a pet rat and generally trampled on conventional notions of femininity.

There was also a comic curmudgeon of an Aunt March (Angela Lansbury), a twisted ankle replete with romantic possibility, lashings of laced corsets and a love interest or two. Emily Watson and Michael Gambon added ballast to the excellent cast as the girls’ careworn mother and benevolent neighbour.

Without giving too much away, Little Women the novel ventures away from the fireside and into darker territory – signalled at the end of last night’s episode by the news about the girls’ father’s illness. In the next two episodes, this should add grit and pace to this sweet meander through Alcott’s well-thumbed pages.