How to Be a Heroine: Or, what I've learned from reading too much

Cathy Earnshaw or Jane Eyre? Scarlett or Melanie? Petrova or Posy? A funny, touching, inspiring exploration of the role of heroines, and our favourite books, in all our lives.

On a pilgrimage to Wuthering Heights with her best friend, Samantha Ellis found herself arguing about which heroine she liked best: Jane Eyre or Cathy Earnshaw. She was all for wild, free, passionate Cathy, but her friend found Cathy silly, a snob who betrays Heathcliff for Edgar and makes them all unhappy – while Jane makes her own way. And that’s when she 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 – and harder –– at all the heroines she'’d loved through her life, from her earliest obsessions with the Little Mermaid and Anne of Green Gables; and then on to Scarlett O’Hara, Sylvia Plath, the Dolls (of the Valley); and later Riders, Buffy, Flora Poste from Cold Comfort Farm and many, many more. Some of her heroines lived up to the scrutiny (she will always love Lizzy Bennet); some of them most decidedly did not (thought Katy Carr from What Katy Did was a carefree rebel? Think again. She’'s a drip).

These were the girls, the women, the books, that had shaped her ideas of how to live, of what kind of woman she wanted to be. But had she always chosen the wrong heroines? Should she abandon them, or did they have more to teach her about being the heroine of her own life? How to Be a Heroine is her funny, touching, inspiring exploration of the role of heroines, and our favourite books, in all our lives.