Jo’s School for Boys: Where Learning and Love Meet

Louisa’s sister May had asked Louisa not to write so much about Amy in the sequels because she received lots of hate mail from people who wanted Jo and Laurie together.

It’s really sad, especially because A. May didn’t write the book, and B, she knew the real-life Laurie, but she didn’t marry them. I have always liked Amy’s character, but she’s still very much hated. In the 2019 Little Women this competition between Jo and Amy, some people felt that they were fighting with Laurie because Timothee Chalamet said that Laurie only loved Jo, which is not the case in the book and Greta Gerwig erased Laurie’s character. For example, in that scene where Jo loses the trip to Europe, Marmee is like “oh my poor Jo. You are the one who should have got the trip”, and Amy’s like, “why? Nobody’s happy for me!”

I don’t see that as a good portrayal of either Jo or Amy and Marmee does not take Jo’s side in the book. In the chapter Calls, Jo was mean to the aunts and that is why she lost the trip Marmee says to her it was all her fault and Amy feels bad for Jo in the book. In the film that’s all turned upside down.

I don’t know why, but some people read who read Little Men, say that there is a triangle between Jo and Laurie and Friedrich because there are scenes with Laurie, but fewer scenes with Amy.

I think the book structure suffers from this because when you read Jo Boys and there is more Amy in it, it feels more balanced at least to me as a reader. In Little Men, Jo and Lori go to buy a toy store for Daisy together, and then he helps to fund the museum. Laurie is written to be this fun uncle and he falls back into that boy’s behaviour when he’s with Jo.

I think in the museum scene, he pretends to jump out of the window. In my life, I have never seen anything romantic between Jo’s and Laurie’s interactions in Little Men. My friend Jimena said, that when reading Little Women, she was expecting to read these very romantic moments between Jo and Laurie that Greta Gerwig had talked about, and…