HOW TO BE A HEROINE

A literary journey to self-discovery.

Growing up in London in a family of Iraqi-Jewish refugees, playwright Ellis (Cling to Me Like Ivy, 2010) looked for models of courage and adventure and, she hoped, an escape from the future her parents planned for her: marriage to an Iraqi-Jewish man, children and a well-kept home. In this autobiography of reading, the author recalls the fictional characters she saw as heroines, including Anne of Green Gables; strong-willed Scarlett O’Hara; the elegant Anne Welles of Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls; and the consummate storyteller, Scheherazade. Louisa May Alcott’s Jo March “was fabulously rebellious” but disappointed Ellis when she married a German professor and gave up writing to run a school. At 12, Ellis loved Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet “for her muddy petticoats, her irreverence and her big heart. But mostly I loved her defiance of convention.” Until she switched her allegiance to brave, clever Jane Eyre, passionate Cathy Earnshaw, of Wuthering Heights, was the heroine she wanted most to emulate. “Back then,” Ellis writes, “I wanted my heroines to show me new ways to be, like heedless, selfish Cathy.” As a college student, she found a kindred spirit in Sylvia Plath and her protagonist, Esther Greenwood, of The Bell Jar. Dressing in black, wearing heavy eyeliner, Ellis decided to go to Cambridge, “where Plath’s poetry took off, and where she met Ted Hughes.” From Lucy Honeychurch, in E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View, she got “the idea of becoming an artist and living an artist’s life. It was because of her that I started writing plays.” Her first was inspired by Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, in which she identified with the angry Martha.

As Ellis shows in this charming, gracefully written memoir, literary heroines revealed to her new life stories, new selves and her own power to invent her life.