How To Be A Heroine

by Samantha Ellis

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Title Page

  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

  Index

  Acknowledgements

  Bibliography

  Copyright

  About the Book

  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, free, passionate Cathy, but her friend found Cathy silly, a snob who betrays Heathcliff for Edgar and makes them all unhappy – 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? Clearly it’s Melanie), joyous reunions (Anne of Green Gables), nostalgia trips (Sylvia Plath) and tearful goodbyes (Lucy Honeychurch). And then there was Jilly Cooper . . .

  How To Be A Heroine is a 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.

  About the Author

  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.

  For my mother, and for Emma, top heroines

  How To Be A Heroine

  Or, What I’ve Learned from Reading too Much

  Samantha Ellis

  INTRODUCTION

  A couple of summers ago, I was on the Yorkshire moors, arguing (over the wuthering) with my best friend about whether we’d rather be Jane Eyre or Cathy Earnshaw.

  I thought Cathy. Obviously Cathy. The point of this walk (this pilgrimage) was to see the ruins of the farmhouse that inspired Wuthering Heights, which loomed at us promisingly from the top. We’d both, without consulting each other, worn lace-edged T-shirts in honour of the occasion, and after stopping off for supplies in Haworth, here we were at last, and it was just as I’d imagined: all rain-green moorland, spiky heather, a turbulent waterfall and signs beguilingly translated into Japanese (the Brontës are big in Japan).

  It was supposed to be Emily Brontë’s favourite walk. She was an inveterate walker, always out, in all weathers. Once, she found a merlin hawk in an abandoned nest and brought him home. She called him Hero. Or possibly Nero. No one can read her handwriting. She painted a watercolour of him, and in her poem, ‘The Caged Bird’, she imagined him longing for ‘Earth’s breezy hills and heaven’s blue sea’. And in fact he did escape, while she was away studying in Brussels, and when she got back she could find no trace of him.

  I hoped we might see a hawk. But I was excited just to be there, on the moor Emily had walked, the moor Cathy spends whole days out on, and haunts after her death. I was just about managing to stop myself from yelling out to Heathcliff that it was me, Cathy, coming home.

  So stoic, virtuous, plain Jane was very much not on my mind. But Emma argued that Jane was independent, she knew who she was, she didn’t suffer fools and she stuck to her principles. ‘And Cathy’s just silly.’ Ignoring my howls of fury, she continued, ‘She’s always weeping and wailing, and she says she loves Heathcliff but she marries the rich boy because she’s a snob, and that makes everyone unhappy.’

  I defended Cathy. She’s passionate and headstrong – and gorgeous. ‘You can’t like her just because she’s pretty,’ said Emma. All right, but Cathy doesn’t mean to marry the wrong man. She’s pushed into it. And she regrets it, doesn’t she? Emma asked, ‘Why not just not marry the wrong man?’

  I was thrown. Emma had been my best friend since we were eleven, which meant we’d been lending each other books and passionately discussing them for over twenty years. She’d introduced me to J.D. Salinger, I’d introduced her to Antonia White. We had once spent a whole week lying side by side on a beach, both reading War and Peace. We didn’t always agree. Not agreeing was part of the fun. But this was different.

  Cathy’s claims to my loyalty were strong. I’d known her almost as long as I’d known Emma; since I first read Wuthering Heights at twelve, she had been my favourite literary heroine, the undisputed queen. Cathy and Emma had both been there for me at dark times, and Cathy had even supported some of my more impulsive romantic decisions – which Emma had advised against. I was looking forward to seeing Cathy’s house. Yes, it was ruined, yes I would have to imagine the window ledges with her name scratched over and over in the paint, but at least I would feel ‘the north wind blowing over the edge’ and see the ‘gaunt thorns all stretching their limbs one way as if craving alms of the sun’.

  But when we reached Top Withens, the skies cleared. The clouds vanished and the sun shone, as if this was the backdrop for some moment of revelation. Which it was. I was wrong.

  My whole life, I’d been trying to be Cathy, when I should have been trying to be Jane.

  As we leaned against the warm stone, basking – actually basking – in the sun, drinking flasks of tea, I wondered why I’d written Jane off. She is independent, and brave, and clever, and she really does stay true to herself. And while Cathy ends up a wandering ghost, Jane ends up happily married. The brilliant sunshine was very Jane weather, I thought; pleasant, clear and rational. It would have rained for Cathy, there would have been thunder and lightning. And (said a small, but firm Jane voice) we would have shivered and eaten soggy sandwiches hunched under the hoods of our waterproofs.

  The Brontë Society had put a plaque on the ruin, warning over-eager fans that Top Withens wasn’t actually Wuthering Heights, and that even before it was ruined, the farmhouse ‘bore no resemblance’ to the house in the novel – though they did concede that ‘the situation may have been in her mind’. It felt like a corrective to romance, a prompt to question old assumptions. I decided that when I got back to London, I would dig out my copies of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre and read them again, with more scrutiny and less sentiment. I would find out how I really felt about Cathy and Jane. But maybe that wouldn’t be the end of it. After all, if I’d been wrong about Cathy, had I been wrong about my other heroines too?

  Once I’d asked that terrifying question, I knew I would have to meet all my heroines again, every last one. I wanted to think about what they meant to me when I was growing up, and what they mean to me now that I’m grown up, and a playwright and writing heroines of my own.

  As a girl, I had thought of myself as being, like Catherine Morland in Jane Austen’s Nor
thanger Abbey, ‘in training for a heroine’, an activity I thought both important and worthwhile. I had read to find out what kind of woman I might want to be, lived through my heroines, and rehearsed lives I might live. But I’d also cringed at the moment when Catherine, intoxicated by her beloved Gothic novels, is prowling round Northanger Abbey to see if she can find evidence that her host, General Tilney, has murdered his wife or maybe just imprisoned her in a secret dungeon. She is caught red-handed by droll, charming Henry Tilney, who pours cold water on her lurid suspicions. She nearly dies of shame at how her reading has led her astray. She vows to keep fact and fiction strictly separate. After meeting my heroines again, would I end up making the same vow? Maybe even trying to be ‘in training for a heroine’ had been a terrible mistake – perhaps the line was Austen’s joke against Catherine and never meant to be taken as seriously as I had taken it. I had a chilling image of myself editing my bookshelves, of the gap Wuthering Heights would leave when I – what? – put it in the bin? Burned it? Even the idea of giving it away was unthinkable.

  But maybe I would have to think unthinkable things. My confusion over Cathy and Jane made me suddenly feel that I didn’t quite know how I’d got here, and it seemed important to find out. Otherwise, how would I know where I was going? Next to my heroines, I felt undefined, formless; I had no narrative arc, no quest, no journey. And these are things I have to think about professionally. When I write heroines, I always try to give them strong objectives, burning desires, journeys like the one the archetypal hero is supposed to make. In his storytelling bible, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell says a hero must cross a border, defeat a dragon and return with treasure that will heal his people. Notoriously, Campbell thought women didn’t need to make these journeys. But I think we do. And, having reached my mid-thirties, I didn’t know what mine was.

  Back in London, a pile of books formed by my bed. They were battered and tear-stained, their jackets scuffed, spines cracked, margins scrawled in; some had flowers pressed between the pages, some bulged from being dropped in the bath. The heroines on their covers were like old friends: there was Katy Carr climbing a fence in a red dress, Sara Crewe in rags talking to a large rat, Nanda Grey backed by flowers and wistfully staring at the sky, Posy Fossil practising ballet in a mirror-walled studio. I hoped I’d still like them. I hoped I wouldn’t end up thinking they’d ruined my life.

  My reading had sometimes got me into trouble. As when a desire for Scarlett O’Hara’s seventeen-inch waist made me crash-diet at sixteen. Or when The Bell Jar made me think that suffering would make me a woman. But my heroines had helped me too. Growing up in the Iraqi Jewish community in London, I knew, from early on, that I didn’t want the happy ending my parents wanted for me: marriage to a nice Iraqi Jewish boy. Sleeping Beauty made me think I could do something different. Lizzy Bennet gave me hope that that might involve something more interesting than being a princess. Anne Shirley inspired me to become a writer. Franny Glass consoled me for my loss of faith. Marjorie Morningstar made me love the theatre.

  Reading that pile of books again, I realised that some of my heroines had misled me, some now seem irrelevant, some I had wildly misread, some I now regret. But many – most – were a pleasure to meet again. I rediscovered the wonder of immersing myself in books, the way I did as a girl. When my heroines confused or disappointed me, I read the writers’ diaries, letters and biographies to find out what really happened to the women (they were mostly women) who created my heroines; why they poured their hopes into their heroines, and why they sold them short. I realised how partisan my line-up of heroines was, and how partial, and found myself hungry for new heroines – like go-getting Judy Jordan from Lace, and fierce, ambitious Emily Byrd Starr.

  And when I went back to Northanger Abbey, I found it wasn’t nearly as down on reading as I’d feared. Austen stays firmly on her heroine’s side. (My favourite authors always do.) Catherine may make wild claims, but Austen backs her up. So, although General Tilney is no murderer, he does turn out to be a villain. He sends Catherine away, extremely rudely, insisting that she leave at once, without an escort, without giving her time to let her family know, forcing her to travel seventy miles unaccompanied. All because he’s learned that she is less wealthy than he’d thought.

  Catherine was right: General Tilney is a villain. She was right to read life like a book: her mistake was to think she was in a Gothic melodrama when actually she’s in a domestic comedy. Once she knows her genre, she gets herself home, not unheroically. Henry eats his words, defies his father and proposes. And Catherine ends the novel ready to embark on the adventure of marriage with a charming, amusing man who likes to read until his hair stands on end and thinks anyone who doesn’t enjoy a good novel is intolerably stupid. Catherine has completed her training and become a heroine. I don’t think anyone is ‘born to be a heroine’. It takes effort, valour, and a willingness to investigate your own heart.

  So here I am, showing willing. Because as I started reading again the books that had meant so much to me, I remembered how I’d felt as a four-year-old wishing I was the Little Mermaid, or at twenty, wanting to be Lucy Honeychurch. It was hard to confront my mistakes, and I had to ask myself difficult questions. But I discovered that I did have an arc and a journey after all. I wasn’t just reading about my heroines, I was reading the story of my life.

  1

  THE LITTLE MERMAID

  THE SUMMER I was four, I got lost on a beach in Italy. I wandered off from my family, and we didn’t find each other again for two whole hours. My mother says it was the worst two hours of her life. They had police helicopters out looking for me and everything. But although I knew I was lost, I wasn’t scared. It was my first time ever on my own. I walked further than I had ever walked. I made sandcastles with a small Italian boy. I went on past the tourist part of the beach, and it was just me and the sand and the sea and the sky. Walking along the very edge of the sea, splashing through the cool water, I felt amazingly free. When I was reunited with my parents, I cried. I was glad to be safe again. But it had been an adventure. And now it was a story, with me at the centre of it. And even then, I wanted to live a storybook life.

  My young, beautiful mother had already had a storybook life, with a childhood in Baghdad, then persecution, a failed escape across the mountains of Kurdistan, twenty days in prison, a successful escape to London and a whirlwind romance with my father – all by the time she was 22. She was my first heroine. I thought her life was high romance. My mother did not. She wanted to shield me from suffering, she wanted me never to have to go through what she’d gone through; she wanted me to have a boring life. Throughout my childhood, this outraged me. Never to have adventures? Never to do extraordinary things? Never to take risks? When I once wished aloud that I could go to prison because at least it would be interesting, my mother shuddered.

  She wanted my life to have a happy ending: a wedding. Which I thought would be fine, if I could marry a prince. My first fictional heroine, even before I could read, was Sleeping Beauty. I liked her because she was beautiful. I wanted, very much, to have golden hair and blue eyes. My eyes had started blue and gone green, but maybe if I wished hard enough, they’d change back, and maybe my unruly brown curls would straighten and go blonde. Then I’d look like a princess, which was halfway to being one.

  It was the end of the Seventies, and Lynda Carter was always on TV, as Wonder Woman, doing her dazzling spinning transformations. I would make myself dizzy in the living room, copying her, hoping my hair would fly free and a mystical ball of light would appear as my clothes were replaced, not by superheroine spangles but maybe by a dancing dress and probably a tiara.

  And even though I now regard Sleeping Beauty with the proper feminist horror (her main characteristic is beauty! She spends a hundred years in a coma! She never does anything! She never wants anything!), I can’t help but feel a residual affection for her. Because she was my first fictional heroine and she gave me a desire, an aim,
a goal: I wouldn’t have a boring life because although I would get married like my family wanted me to, I would marry a prince.

  In the 1959 Disney film I watched over and over, the love story is the point. Sleeping Beauty is barely in danger. She’s not even asleep for very long. She meets her square-jawed prince before she pricks her finger, so the minute she falls asleep, the race is on to find her, kiss her (because only true love’s kiss will break the spell) and marry her. It all happens very quickly, and there’s a similarly swift resolution of the fairies’ argument about what colour Sleeping Beauty’s dress should be (obviously, it ends up pink). This all made sense to me, then. And when, a bit later, I read the story in Grimms’ Fairy Tales, where Sleeping Beauty is asleep for years and years, and the whole palace falls asleep with her, and a forest grows up around them, and it takes a real hero of a prince to hack his way through, I liked that even better.

  Now I find the Grimm story a bit prissy. I like the girl stopped in time and the freeze-framed palace servants, and the brilliantly disquieting image of the many sad, young princes who try to get through the forest but die, in the flower of their youth, because ‘the thorns held fast together, as if they had hands, and the youths were caught in them, could not get loose again, and died a miserable death’. But the story still hurtles towards a kiss, a wedding and a happy ever after. The version Charles Perrault wrote in 1697, a century before the Brothers Grimm cleaned up the story, is much darker and stranger.

  Perrault’s story doesn’t end with the prince waking Sleeping Beauty with a kiss. Not at all. Instead, he goes on to tell us what happens after Sleeping Beauty gets married. She’s out of the frying pan and almost literally into the fire, because her mother-in-law is a jealous ogress who orders her steward to kill and cook Beauty’s children, Dawn and Day, in ‘piquant sauce’. The kind steward fools the ogress by cooking a lamb and a kid, but when she asks for beauty to be cooked in the same sauce, he panics, because although Beauty is officially 20, she’s been asleep a hundred years. ‘Her skin, though white and beautiful, had become a little tough, and what animal could he possibly find that would correspond to her?’ He decides on venison. But the ogress knows she’s been fooled, so she decides to kill Beauty, Dawn and Day herself. She gets a vat and fills it with vipers. Luckily her son returns and catches her red-handed. She dives into the vat herself and is devoured by the hideous creatures inside.