The girls of the 1860s appear to be having a moment. Two weeks ago, the trailer for Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of Little Women – featuring a stacked cast including Emma Watson, Saoirse Ronan, Meryl Streep, Laura Dern and Timothée Chalamet – dropped with much fanfare, depending on your cultural circle. The Lady Bird director’s take on Louisa May Alcott’s classic novel, first published in 1868, seems ready to breathe a modern, candid air into the story of four sisters confronting change and (often thwarted) ambition during the civil war. In the trailer, Ronan, as Jo March (the young, tomboyish writer Alcott modeled after herself), punches Chalamet, as neighbor boy Laurie, in the arm; the sisters wrestle; Jo and Laurie dance in the dark and then break into a full, joyous flail.

Dancing is also a highlight of the trailer for Dickinson, a new series from Apple TV, that was released earlier this week. Starring 22-year-old Hailee Steinfeld, the series promises to explore the life of poet Emily Dickinson “with a modern sensibility and tone”. Judging by the trailer, this sensibility appears to be one of teenage insouciance and badassery, not unlike the kind Steinfeld played in 2017’s Edge of Seventeen. The real Dickinson was a noted introvert, but in this version, she’s a lark – declaring boldly her intention to become famous, strumming an air guitar, and swinging her hair as if at a club. “Were I with thee, wild nights would be our luxury,” says Steinfeld’s voiceover as her young Dickinson boards a carriage in the night for a tryst, or at least a transgression.

Never mind that the poem from which she reads, Wild Nights, has been interpreted by some as suggesting religious ecstasy instead of physical; that Dickinson spent most of her life in seclusion, or that she sought little notoriety in her lifetime – Dickinson, the television series, seems ready to hook viewers on the name of perhaps the only famous American female poet of the 19th century, regardless of fact. It’s less a question of historical accuracy, which can be tedious and unnecessary (see: the delight that is The Favourite), than one of faith. Dickinson promises to take viewers “into the world of Emily, audaciously exploring the constraints of society, gender and family from the perspective of a budding writer who doesn’t fit in to her own time through her imaginative point of view”. But what if that view has nothing to do with its inspiration, using a young poet as a shiny flash of girl power for views over her complicated, secretive, very real mind?

That conclusion may be premature, but it seems worth asking what these revisions offer – especially at a time when redundant and rebooted IP dominate the box office, and as new streaming services such as Disney+ and Apple TV vie for attention with any established brand. This is very much an open question – I’m going by trailers here, and as ready to relate anew to school-day literary icons as anyone.

The two projects naturally draw comparisons. Dickinson was born in 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts; Alcott, who grew up 75 miles away, in Concord, two years later. Both Little Women and Dickinson take place in 1860s New England, and though both are fictional, they are inextricable from the psyches of their female creators – one a new take on the author’s projection of her coming-of-age, the other a revisionist show centered on a shadowy, frustratingly elusive poetry icon. It’s not new material, either; there have been several Little Women adaptations over the years, and two films coloring in the sketches of Dickinson’s life – 2016’s A Quiet Passion, starring a fiery Cynthia Nixon, and Wild Nights with Emily, which imagines a love affair between Dickinson (Molly Shannon) and her sister-in-law.

But the trailers suggest two very different applications of the fresh look. While Dickinson appears to consider very little about the real poet – more Drunk History hinged on a famous name than her re-livened world – Gerwig’s Little Women goes more for the sweet spot between historical faithfulness and modern expressions of emotion.

“We wanted it to feel light on its feet,” Gerwig told Entertainment Weekly (EW) of the film. “And even though it does take place in the 19th century, we in no way wanted it to feel like it was something that was past. We wanted it to feel like it was present right now.”

In the trailer, Jo says, impassioned: “Women have minds and they have souls as well as just hearts. They’ve got ambition and they’ve got talent as well as just beauty. I am so sick of people saying that love is just all a woman is fit for. I’m so sick of it!” The quote, Gerwig told EW, comes not from the book but one of Alcott’s own letters. When she first read it, Gerwig said, “I just cried. There was something so alive about it.”

This seems as good a spirit as any for a promising adaptation – honoring the feeling of recognition, the discovery of past revelations that bloom again, as if funneled through the time-space portal, in the present.

But they are just trailers, after all designed to get you to a theater or signing up for Apple TV or reading articles like this one. Whether or not any of these adaptations live up to their inspirations – or if that even matters – is a question for later, when the tweets go out and the metrics come in. If anything, the resurgence of Emily Dickinson and Alcott’s March sisters demonstrate what many have already known: the territory of girlhood has always been rich, even if faithfulness to it often has not.

• Little Women is released in the US on 25 December and in the UK on 26 December. Dickinson will be released on Apple TV later this year