Little Women

The novel's second half resolves each sister's story in turn. Meg settles into married life with John Brooke, raising twins and learning, with Marmee's guidance, to balance devotion to her children with attention to her husband. Jo, meanwhile, wrestles with Laurie's growing romantic feelings for her. Unable to return his love as anything but a sister would, she puts distance between them by spending several months in New York, where she works as a governess and meets Professor Friedrich Bhaer, a poor but principled German language tutor who gently discourages her from writing sensational pulp stories for money. When Jo returns home, Laurie proposes and she refuses him, a rejection that sends him abroad with his grandfather to nurse his heartbreak.

Back in Massachusetts, Beth's health, permanently damaged by the scarlet fever she contracted years earlier, finally fails, and she dies peacefully at home with her family around her. Her death draws Laurie and Amy, who have been traveling in Europe, closer together; Amy, unimpressed by his aimless grief, pushes him to find purpose, and he falls in love with her in earnest. Because Amy's aunt will not permit her to travel home with Laurie and his grandfather unchaperoned, the two marry in Europe before returning to America together.

Some time later, Professor Bhaer comes to Massachusetts on business and visits the March family daily for two weeks. On his final day he proposes to Jo, who realizes she loves him and accepts. Since he is poor, he goes west to build up a stable income before they can marry. During this period, wealthy Aunt March dies and leaves her grand estate, Plumfield, to Jo. Jo marries Friedrich and together they convert Plumfield into a school for boys, eventually having two sons of their own.

The book closes with an apple-picking gathering at Plumfield celebrating Marmee's sixtieth birthday. Mr. and Mrs. March, their three surviving daughters (Meg, Jo, and Amy), their husbands, and five grandchildren (including Amy and Laurie's daughter) are all present, affirming the family's enduring closeness despite Beth's death and the hardships they endured.

Alcott marries Jo off. Gerwig turns the marriage into a business decision.

In the novel Friedrich proposes, Jo realises she loves him, and they marry; when Aunt March dies and leaves her Plumfield, Jo turns the house into a school for boys and raises two sons there. The book closes at apple-picking time on Marmee's sixtieth birthday, the whole family gathered in the house Jo inherited.

The film keeps those events and reframes the wedding as fiction. Mr. Dashwood will publish Jo's novel, but he refuses to let its heroine finish unmarried — so Jo writes him the scene he wants, the one where the protagonist stops Bhaer from leaving for California, and takes her copyright and her royalties in exchange. The romance you are watching is the thing she sold him. And Gerwig does not end on the wedding at all. She ends with Jo at the press, watching her novel being printed.