How to be a Heroine by Samantha Ellis

 

Samantha Ellis has recently written a book about Anne Brontë called: Take Courage: Anne Brontë and the Art of Life.  I was rattending a zoom meeting with The Brussels Brontë Group a couple of weeks ago, where Samantha held a talk about the book, her research and her relationship with the Brontës. A must read. In the meantime, I found one of her earlier books in the library, How to be a Heroine - Or What I Have Learned From Reading Too Much.

"While debating literature’s greatest heroines with her best friend, thirtysomething playwright Samantha Ellis has a revelation—her whole life, she's been trying to be Cathy Earnshaw of Wuthering Heights when she should have been trying to be Jane Eyre.

With this discovery, she embarks on a retrospective look at the literary ladies—the characters and the writers—whom she has loved since childhood. From early obsessions with the March sisters to her later idolization of Sylvia Plath, Ellis evaluates how her heroines stack up today. And, just as she excavates the stories of her favorite characters, Ellis also shares a frank, often humorous account of her own life growing up in a tight-knit Iraqi Jewish community in London. Here a life-long reader explores how heroines shape all our lives."

A wonderful, witty account of her reading and how it has formed her life. The heroines she has chosen to highlight has guided her through different phases of her life and also gave some comfort when times were hard. We get a good background to her life as a teenager and as a grown up. It is very well done and makes for interesting reading.

So, who are the heroines who have been such an important part and an inspiration in life? 

The Little Mermaid, Anne of the Green Gables, Lizzy Bennet, Scarlett O'Hara, Franny Glass, Esther Greenwood, Valley of he Dolls, Cathy Earnshaw, Flora Poste and Scheherazade. 

I can't say I know of all of them, but most. Some of them has also affected me during my reading. An easy read and a must for anyone with heroines in their life. 

For those of you interested in a summary of her talk for The Brussels Brontë Group, here are two links. 

A review by Pauline Ghyselen and by Helen MacEwan