Little Women was one of the first books I ever read that wasn’t about Nancy Drew or the Bobbsey Twins; I always associate it with my grandmother, an elementary school teacher, who liked to brag that I was reading it in third grade even though it was written on a sixth-grade level. But as time went by, I became more attached to other books about girls who write, and I’ve reread Anne of Green Gables and the Betsy-Tacy books more often than Alcott’s masterpiece.

I dug out my Illustrated Junior Library copy the other day—check it out online, it has the best illustrations—to get ready for the Greta Gerwig movie that’s opening soon. I’ve never managed to watch a film version all the way through because the onscreen March sisters could never live up to the images I had of them, influenced by those Louis Jambor illustrations. But I figured that I’m old enough, and far enough removed from my emotional attachment to Alcott’s characters, to see what Gerwig does with the story. And in the meantime, I reread the book to see how it holds up.

Starting from the first line, it felt like coming home: “‘Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,’ grumbled Jo, lying on the rug.” Even for a girl who doesn’t celebrate Christmas, that’s an enticing opening. I was surprised by how many other scenes and specific lines I remembered, and especially the chapter titles: “Beth Finds the Palace Beautiful,” “Amy’s Valley of Humiliation,” “Meg Goes to Vanity Fair,” “Laurie Makes Mischief, and Jo Makes Peace.” I was also surprised that the sisters were more rounded characters than I remembered, especially Amy. I wasn’t disappointed that the youngest March wound up marrying Laurie—whom I, along with generations of readers, have thought was meant for Jo, not least because he was my namesake—but found myself thinking them perfectly matched, with Amy much more mature and self-aware than I remembered.

This turns out to be an opinion shared by Jane Smiley in March Sisters: On Life, Death, and Little Women, a new book from the Library of America featuring essays by four authors about the four sisters: Kate Bolick on Meg, Jenny Zhang on Jo, Carmen Maria Machado on Beth, and Smiley on Amy. Machado still holds a grudge against Amy for burning Jo’s manuscript, which, she says, “created a lifelong terror of losing the only copy of one’s words,” and thinks it would have been more satisfying if Jo had let Amy drown when she fell through the ice soon afterwards. Smiley sees Amy as Jo’s foil, a character who has to be just as complex and rounded as Jo, “as ready to learn, though in different ways, and ready to do battle so that their conflict will force them to learn from their experiences.”

Reading March Sisters led me to another nonfiction book, Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters by Anne Boyd Rioux (Norton), an enjoyable overview of Alcott’s life and the influence of her novel over the years. I was glad to be reminded of what can only be called Alcott’s feminist way of looking at the world. While most Little Women fans know that Alcott married Jo to Professor Bhaer only because her publisher insisted on it, it’s refreshing to see her skeptical attitude to her own Transcendentalist father, who would never compromise his ideals enough to earn a living for his family: “It requires three women to take care of a philosopher, and when the philosopher is old the three women are pretty well used up.” It isn’t surprising that Louisa never got married herself. My 16-year-old son learned about Bronson Alcott in his U.S. history class this year, but the textbook didn’t even mention that he was Louisa’s father, which I found astonishing. Who is the more important figure in American history? I find it hard to imagine anyone not saying Louisa.

Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.