There are four March sisters in Little Women, Louisa May Alcott’s 150-year-old, still-beloved novel about life in Civil War-era New England—but there’s only one who managed to inspire everyone from Nora Ephron to Joyce Carol Oates. Second-oldest sibling Jo, a writer and bold rejector of gender roles, has been encouraging artistic, adventure-seeking girls to chase their dreams for more than a century. She’s been the star of every major adaptation of Alcott’s magnum opus—the latest of which is a PBS Masterpiece miniseries, premiering May 13, with Maya Hawke as Jo.

She’ll have big boots to fill. To the generation that came of age two decades ago, there’s already a definitive Jo: Winona Ryder, who starred in Gillian Armstrong’s 1994 Little Women film alongside a cast that included Susan Sarandon, Christian Bale, Kirsten Dunst, and Claire Danes. At first, Armstrong wasn’t convinced that Ryder would be right for the part of headstrong, tomboyish Jo; the actress had made her name in feminine roles that emphasized her ethereal beauty, in movies like The Age of Innocence, The House of the Spirits, and Edward Scissorhands.

But meeting Ryder changed the director’s mind. As Armstrong said in an interview, Ryder was “so smart, passionate, and funny”—so different from her aloof, mysterious movie persona. And she instantly bonded with her co-stars, including Danes as frail Beth, Dunst as society-lady-in-training Amy, and Trini Alvarado as maternal Meg.

Celebrated as it is now, the film was risky in its time. When Armstrong presented her director’s cut of Little Women to executives at Sony’s Columbia Pictures, the studio brass—notably then-Columbia chairman Mark Canton, she said—walked into the screening filled with dread. Armstrong sensed that they resented spending an afternoon sitting through a kids’ movie—especially one about 19th-century New England teenagers wassailing, or sewing, or doing whatever it was that they did in 1862.

As the credits rolled, the suits were singing a different tune. “They all cried,” Armstrong said. “That was my best audience screening ever: a room full of men in suits who cried for women.” When it was released, Little Women won glowing reviews, and grossed $50 million on an $18 million budget to boot.

That’s in no small part thanks to Ryder’s Oscar-nominated interpretation of Jo—a young woman who’s simultaneously sweet and strange, fragile and tough, angry and joyous. Even in the 1990s, it was rare to see an ambitious woman—a misfit, no less!—glorified on the big screen, let alone one so young. The movie seemed like a valentine addressed to a generation of precocious girls, so beloved that even Ryder’s 2001 arrest for shoplifting made her something of a folk hero in their eyes—even as she was largely shunned by the entertainment industry. (“It’s very, very sad that she’s had those missing years in her career, I have to say,” Armstrong said of Ryder, who was absent from the spotlight for years before landing another hit with Netflix’s Stranger Things. “I think I’m allowed to say that without being too hurtful. And it’s great to see that she’s back.”)

Both Armstrong and Sarandon, who played Jo’s feminist mother, Marmee, are used to hearing from die-hard Little Women fans. Perhaps the film still strikes such a chord because, as Sarandon pointed out in a recent conversation, it’s about young women deciding their fates in a world of limited options—a narrative that’s as alluring as it is rarely told. (Sarandon herself pushed to make the film as realistic as possible, for it to show “dirty petticoats” and real evidence of the March family’s financial struggles.) Though “more and more things are open to you now,” she said, the questions raised by the novel-turned-film remain relevant as ever: who am I? How do I rise above the limits of gender and class to achieve my potential, and balance the obligations of family life with the desire for something more? Or, as the wry Susan Cheever—author of a 2010 biography of Alcott—put it: “The depressing thing about Little Women is how little has changed.”

Even divorced from Ryder’s performance, or the wider context of the story, Jo is fascinating. She’s a mess of contradictions that blend to form one of the most honest and complex heroines in literature—a “lodestar,” in Cheever’s words. She stuns everyone by selling her hair—her “one beauty!”—to help pay for Marmee’s trip to visit their ill father, a chaplain in the Union Army. During a feud with Amy, she gets paralyzed with shock when her youngest sister falls through some thin ice—and rather than immediately plunging after her, Jo nearly leaves Amy to drown. Most unforgivably to generations of readers, Jo also walks away from what might have been a fantasy life with Laurie, the wealthiest, dreamiest boy next door—because she’s not in love with him.

In some ways, Cheever suggested, Little Women’s power was a historical accident. Alcott wasn’t viewed in the same competitive light as her male contemporaries, which allowed her to write honestly—and with a license to explore Jo’s dark feelings. “The darkness is always the hardest part to write. And Alcott just got it,” she said. That quality makes Jo not just inspiring, but dangerous—a rebel, a counterpoint to those demanding that women be ladylike and pretty for the purpose of pleasing men. Jo rejected Laurie’s marriage proposal because she didn’t care to please him—she wanted to be free to see the world and experience it for herself. She wanted to be Laurie.

In a rather Jo-like move, Maya Hawke, the 19-year-old daughter of Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke, dropped out of Juilliard to take the part in the upcoming PBS miniseries. (The tony conservatory would not allow Hawke to be two weeks late for the start of term in order to shoot Little Women.) Her fitness for the role didn’t stop there: over three enjoyable hours, Hawke thoroughly channels Jo, like Ryder before her—but gives her an earthy edge as well. She’s got the indie-cool charisma of her lineage and a rookie’s lack of self-consciousness.

Hawke also did her homework before the shoot, researching the time period and the Transcendentalist movement that linked Alcott to other literary giants such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. The Marches, the actress said in an interview, are a much more conservative version of Alcott’s actual parents: Amos Bronson Alcott, an educator, Transcendentalist, and abolitionist; and her mother, Abigail, a social worker who helped Bronson hide fugitive slaves along the Underground Railroad.

“I was always interested in her rebellion and in her disregard for convention. I think so many times people get credit for being rebels and for being different and for breaking rules, when really they’re not breaking them,” Hawke said. Jo, however, had no choice but to be unconventional—and so, perhaps, did Alcott, who pulled a rebel move by breaking adolescent hearts and having Jo spurn Laurie, according to Cheever’s book. “Girls write to ask who the little women marry, as if that was the only aim and end of a woman’s life,” Alcott wrote in her journal after the publication of the first volume of Little Women. “I won’t marry Jo to Laurie to please anyone.”

From academia to an upcoming graphic-novel retelling of the story, readers have often asserted that Jo—who speaks repeatedly about wanting to be a man—is gay. But Masterpiece screenwriter Heidi Thomas, however, thinks that isn’t quite right: “When Jo says, ‘I wish I was a man,’ what she’s saying is, ‘I wish I was free. I wish I was free to choose. I wish I was free to travel. I wish I was free not to wear layers and layers of petticoats and dress up all the time.’”

Hawke agrees. “The real story,” she said, “is of a woman who totally breaks the societal norms, and never gets married and remains independent her whole life”—which is what happened to Alcott herself. Due to cultural pressure, though, the author ultimately had to give Jo a husband on the page.

So she did, in the form of Professor Bhaer—the German academic whom Jo eventually marries, an unconventional, middle-aged, rumpled man who is her intellectual equal. The two welcome two sons and open a progressive school for boys, stalling Jo’s plans for literary stardom. Little Women’s last pages flash forward to Jo and her sisters cheerfully discussing the ways in which their lives haven’t turned out as they expected: “I haven’t given up the hope that I may write a good book yet, but I can wait, and I’m sure it will be all the better for such experiences,” she declares.

Such is the reality of Book Jo’s situation; she must postpone her creative pursuits to hold down the fort, a bittersweet and strikingly contemporary ending. Meanwhile, Movie Jo, as portrayed by Ryder, ends on a high note of post-feminist wish fulfillment, with the double triumphs of publishing her masterpiece novel and finding Mr. Right in Bhaer (Gabriel Byrne).

The Masterpiece series, however, stays true to Alcott’s poignant original finale. When Thomas wrote the last scene, she began to cry, thinking: That’s actually the message of Little Women. It’s about embracing imperfection. And sometimes good enough is good enough.

Months later, Thomas screened the final cut for her husband and son. Their response would give Armstrong a warm flash of recognition: after watching Masterpiece’s Little Women, she said, the Thomas men “were in absolute pieces. They couldn’t stop crying. It was a big moment.”