Book review: How To Be A Heroine by Samantha Ellis

Not only is it a fantastic book, it also has one of the most awesome covers ever!

I very rarely write separate book reviews nowadays, usually just relying on my monthly reading round-ups.  But sometimes a book comes along that's pretty special - that deserves its very own post - and this is definitely one of them.

My love for books about books has been stated before, and this is a book about women in books, so even better.  It's part memoir (the sections dealing with Ellis's family history and her own experiences growing up in the tiny Iraqi Jewish community in London are fascinating, and chimed well with my own experiences growing up as the daughter of immigrants), part exploration of the role of the heroine in literature, part joyous rediscovery of childhood favourites. 

Ellis is a reader who, like me, experiences her favourite characters as if they are alive: living, breathing women whose experiences go on beyond the final page.  She has no patience for authors who treat their heroines badly; her furious denouncement of Lousia M Alcott for the way she treats Jo March is a joy to read (and even better is her subsequent discovery - new to me too - that in Jo's Boys Alcott had finally given Jo the ending she deserved, as she becomes a successful writer).

It was interesting to reflect on just how many of the characters I loved in childhood - Jo March, Anne Shirley from Anne Of Green Gables, Katy Carr - were budding writers, and how that idea of a writer-heroine pervades so many novels beloved by bookish young girls.  Ellis is also brilliant when highlighting the pervasive Victorian morals which run through so many of these books.  I, too, always thought of Kate from What Katy Did as a rebel heroine, and it is only in Ellis's retelling that I remembered she spends the majority of the book crippled, atoning for her 'rebellious sin' (of going on a garden swing when she'd been told not to), becoming more and more insipid as she learns "happiness through suffering". 

The theme of suffering was writ large through much of her (and my) teenage reading too; like Ellis, I devoured Sylvia Plath's poetry and her novel, The Bell Jar, and with it the "idea that you had to suffer to be a woman."  There is a great bit where she draws the same parallels many of us troubled mid-90s girls did, between Plath and the glamourously damaged images of Courtney Love, Elizabeth Wurtzel et al.

The greatest joy of this wonderful book (apart from Ellis, quite rightly, identifying Lizzy Bennet as pretty much the uber-heroine of adult literature and the Fossil sisters, from Ballet Shoes, as the toppermost children's heroines) is that it made me want to return to all of the books that I have already read and also made me want to immediately seek out the ones I haven't.  Ellis makes a convincing case for Lace, by Shirley Conran, being close to a feminist text, and totally sold me on Stella Gibbons' Cold Comfort Farm. 

After finishing the book (which I devoured in one sitting), I was left wondering about the heroines Ellis had left out.  I'd love to know what she thinks of Cassandra, the heroine of Dodie Smith's  I Capture The Castle, or the vividly drawn women of Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit Of Love.

I really cannot recommend How To Be A Heroine enough.  This is a book for anyone who was once (or perhaps, like me, who still is!) a bookish, slightly odd girl, happiest to take their cues on living from the characters in novels because they feel like our friends.