How To Be A Heroine
Or, what I’ve learned from reading too much
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Cathy Earnshaw or Jane Eyre?
Petrova or Posy?
Scarlett or Melanie?
Lace or Valley of the Dolls?
On a pilgrimage to Wuthering Heights, Samantha Ellis found herself arguing with her best friend about which heroine was best: Jane Eyre or Cathy Earnshaw. She was all for wild, passionate Cathy; but her friend found Cathy silly, a snob, while courageous Jane makes her own way.
And that’s when Samantha realised that all her life she’d been trying to be Cathy when she should have been trying to be Jane.
So she decided to look again at her heroines – the girls, women, books that had shaped her ideas of the world and how to live. Some of them stood up to the scrutiny (she will always love Lizzy Bennet); some of them most decidedly did not (turns out Katy Carr from What Katy Did isn’t a carefree rebel, she’s a drip). There were revelations (the real heroine of Gone with the Wind? It's Melanie), joyous reunions (Anne of Green Gables), poignant memories (Sylvia Plath) and tearful goodbyes (Lucy Honeychurch). And then there was Jilly Cooper...
How To Be A Heroine is Samantha’s funny, touching, inspiring exploration of the role of heroines, and our favourite books, in all our lives – and how they change over time, for better or worse, just as we do.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
While growing up in London's Iraqi-Jewish community, Ellis knew early on that she didn't want the happy ending her parents wanted for her: "marriage to a nice Iraqi-Jewish boy." In this charming memoir, playwright and journalist Ellis revisits and reevaluates the books that, in childhood and young adulthood, she read to figure out what kind of woman she wanted to be. Her journey begins during an argument with her best friend about which of the Bront sisters' heroines is best, when she realizes that, rather than Wuthering Heights' tumultuous Cathy Earnshaw, she should have been defending rational, clear-sighted Jane Eyre. She goes on to revisit her early admiration for Anne of Green Gables, Lizzy Bennett, and Franny Glass, while also admitting that some of her heroines fall short today, whether because they are too insipid (The Little Princess) or preachy (Little Women). She's unsparing even toward her all-time favorite novel, Wuthering Heights, finding Cathy and Heathcliff's love "the kind... that could only be written by someone who had never been in love." Likable and open about her own vulnerabilities as well as her characters', Ellis concludes that "maybe it's by appropriating our heroines that we become heroines ourselves."
