How to Be a Heroine Or, What I've 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.

Samantha Ellis is a playwright and journalist. The daughter of Iraqi-Jewish refugees, she grew up thinking her family had travelled everywhere by magic carpet. From an early age she knew she didn’t want their version of a happy ending—marriage to a nice Iraqi-Jewish boy—so she read books to find out what she did want. Her plays include Patching Havoc, Sugar and Snow and Cling To Me Like Ivy, and she is a founding member of women’s theatre company Agent 160. She lives in London.

Introduction

1 The Little Mermaid
2 Anne of Green Gables
3 Lizzy Bennet
4 Scarlett O’Hara
5 Franny Glass
6 Esther Greenwood
7 Lucy Honeychurch
8 The Dolls (from the Valley)
9 Cathy Earnshaw
10 Flora Poste
11 Scheherazade

Postscript
Bibliography
Acknowledgements