“How to Be a Heroine: Or, what I've learned from reading too much” summary — Samantha Ellis

Introduction

You often look to books for guidance on how to live, choosing fictional characters as blueprints for your identity. These early literary role models set rigid expectations for romance, ambition, and behavior that rarely match the messy reality of modern life.

You can stop using classic fictional heroines as rigid blueprints for your life and instead learn to become the author of your own story.

Samantha Ellis traces her lifelong obsession with literary heroines from childhood fairy tales through teenage romance to adult memoirs. You will examine how childhood readings shape your adult choices and learn how to rewrite your personal narrative by questioning old literary ideals.

How do fairy tales distort your expectations of love and danger?
Which fictional heroines help you survive adolescence and which hold you back?
Can you reject tragic literary tropes to find your own path?

1. Fairy Tales and Cultural Displacement

Childhood fictional heroines provide early, idealized blueprints for future life goals while mirroring the displacement and outsider status of minority uprooting.

Growing up as the daughter of Iraqi-Jewish refugees who wanted a safe and predictable life for you, you might reject a boring future and seek out fairy tales. You fixate on Sleeping Beauty as your first heroine because of her beauty and royal destiny.

You try to recreate Wonder Woman transformations in your living room, hoping your hair will magically change into a tiara and a dancing dress.

Fairy Tale Revisions

While Disney films present sanitized romance narratives, original iterations by authors like Charles Perrault and Giambattista Basile feature grim post-marriage struggles, cannibalistic mothers-in-law, and morally ambiguous survival. In Charles Perrault's 1697 version of Sleeping Beauty, the story continues after the wedding, where the heroine faces a cannibalistic ogress mother-in-law who tries to cook her children.

Angela Carter's retellings in The Bloody Chamber dismantle passive princess tropes, replacing them with complex characters and active interventions. In Angela Carter's version of Bluebeard, the young bride is rescued not by a prince, but by her gutsy mother who arrives with flying hair and shoots the marquis dead.

Cultural Identity and Memory

Ethnic minority uprooting and unique cultural traditions create a distinct sense of displacement that children process through familiar tropes and stories. Growing up as an Iraqi Jew in London, your family experiences a culturally isolated world filled with specific foods, stories of escape from Baghdad, and fears of persecution.

Your family shares memories of sleeping on roofs in Baghdad, eating water buffalo cream sliced with hairpins, and fleeing across the mountains of Kurdistan.

The Little Mermaid functions as a powerful allegory for deracination, misfit status, and the painful transition between two incompatible worlds. The Little Mermaid walks on legs that feel like sharp knives and bleeding swords, mirroring a family history of being unable to return to Iraq.

2. The Power of Imagination and Literary Betrayals

Imagination serves as a vital psychological refuge and tool for empathy, yet classic novels frequently force their vibrant female protagonists into restrictive domestic roles.

Imagination as Survival

Orphaned or displaced heroines use storytelling and pretending to mentally escape grim realities and maintain their resilience. You learn that an overactive imagination helps you survive harsh environments and process heavy historical burdens.

Growing up in London with safety, the author experienced recurring desert nightmares and phobias, which she later realized were echoes of her family's traumatic expulsion and persecution as Iraqi Jews. Her grandfather was imprisoned for months in Baghdad and sank into severe depression, while her mother was interrogated and pulled by her hair in prison.

Historical trauma runs deep through generations of families who fled violent upheavals. Consider the historical markers of these migrations:

587 BC: The year Jews were brought to Baghdad as Nebuchadnezzar's captives.
1940s: The Jewish heyday when Baghdad was one-third Jewish.
350,000: The approximate Jewish population in Baghdad before it fell to just a couple of thousand by the Eighties.
1941: The year of the farhud when Baghdad rioted against Jews.
1950: The year of the mass airlift to Israel where families registered to go.
6,000: The number of Jews who stayed in Iraq hoping things would get better.
1967: The year Iraq sent an army to fight Israel in the Six Day War.
1969: The year nine Jews were hanged in the streets in televised show trials.

To escape such grim realities, literary heroines construct inner worlds. In Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess, published in 1905, Sara Crewe turns her rat-infested attic into a palace. In L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables, published in 1908, Anne Shirley imagines she will stay and enjoy herself even when unwanted by the Cuthberts.

Literary Betrayals

Anne Shirley uses her imagination not just for daydreams, but to understand how other people feel, which helps soften stern figures and resolve conflicts. Anne convinces a fierce old lady, Aunt Josephine, to forgive her for jumping on her bed by asking her to imagine what it is like to be a little orphan girl.

In books like Little Women, published in 1868, independent tomboys who value their independence, temper, or writing ambitions are systematically broken down, censored, or married off. At age twenty-five, Jo March gives up her sensation fiction, burns her writing after criticism from Professor Bhaer, and marries him to run a school exclusively for boys in a scribbling suit and as a good fellow.

Feminist literary critics argue that characters like Beth March, who quietly sacrifice themselves and fade away, represent a form of prolonged suicide stemming from feminine submission. Beth March quietly lives for others, contracts scarlet fever, and wastes away while her family preserves her empty chair as a household saint.

L.M. Montgomery created Emily Byrd Starr in 1923 as a fiercer, more uncompromising version of Anne to champion the absolute priority of a woman's writing career over toxic relationships. Dean Priest was thirty-six years old when he met twelve-year-old Emily, yet she eventually breaks free from him to prioritize her writing after he tells her she has never lived and she burns her manuscript, which she calls the flash.

3. Romance, Defiance, and Reality

Heroines like Elizabeth Bennet offer models of wit and defiance against marriage pressures, contrasting with both gothic drama and modern pulp romances.

You can look to Jane Austen for an escape from passive fairy tales. Austen was twenty years old when she wrote the first draft of Pride and Prejudice. She was in love with the Irish lawyer Tom Lefroy, whose family needed him to marry for money. Austen later refused two marriage proposals from rich and respectable men despite her own dire financial straits, likely drawing courage from the character she created in Lizzy.

Elizabeth Bennet serves as a model of defiance against conventional marriage pressures through her wit and refusal to compromise. Faced with the strict entailment of her family home to Mr. Collins, Lizzy bravely rejects his marriage proposal despite the high stakes and her mother's frantic opposition, supported by her father. Lizzy rejects the unctuous and objectionable Mr. Collins, standing up to his vanity and refusing to marry for mere convenience.

Mr. Darcy embodies a transformative hero whose love and capacity for change make him an appealing partner for an independent heroine. Unlike static characters, Mr. Darcy takes Lizzy's criticisms on board after she rejects him, actively works to improve himself without expecting a reward, and secretly saves her family's reputation. When Lizzy tells Darcy that Lydia has run away with Mr. Wickham, Darcy immediately heads to London and sorts out the crisis with the minimum of fuss.

Practical approaches to marriage, such as those chosen by Charlotte Lucas, offer an alternative realism distinct from romantic ideals. Charlotte recognizes she is not romantic and enters her marriage with her eyes open, cleverly arranging her home so she has minimal contact with Mr. Collins. Charlotte places the sitting room at the back of the house to ensure Mr. Collins remains occupied in his own apartment, managing a bad marriage through sheer practicality.

Superstitious rituals and traditional community structures are deployed to control girls and ward off perceived spiritual dangers. The author's mother attempted to sew British Airways salt sachets into her party dress hem to ward off the Evil Eye, a freewheeling spirit activated by jealousy. At a henna party, the author refused her mother's salt-sewing ritual, leading to a disastrous moment when her hair caught fire from a candle amid the celebrations.

You can protect yourself by following traditional protective measures:

Ward off the Evil Eye by saying seven a lot
Wear the blue Evil Eye symbol
Wear a symbol of a hand or a foot
Discreetly carry salt

Romance and Pulp

Shakespeare's Juliet represents a bolder, more proactive subversion of traditional passive fairy-tale heroines. Thirteen-year-old Juliet orchestrates her own escape and secretly marries, calculatingly taking a drug to fake her own death rather than waiting passively for a prince. Juliet devises a scheme with Friar Laurence to escape her family and build a new life, avoiding the passive tropes seen in Sleeping Beauty stories.

Modern popular fiction like Jilly Cooper's Riders presents an overwhelming world of retro-sexism, humor, and explicit romance that captivates readers. Cooper's novels combine extreme length, recurring tropes, and explicit sexual encounters with witty dialogue and high-stakes drama among the equestrian elite. The author reads Riders as an adult, discovering how humorous exchanges and eccentric characters like Rupert Campbell-Black make the excessive plot strangely compelling across 918 pages.

Contemporary young adult vampire romances like Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series can embed regressive, pro-abstinence, and anti-feminist agendas. Despite starting with an independent protagonist across four total novels, the narrative increasingly promotes domestic servitude, stalking as care, and risking life to avoid terminating a pregnancy. Bella Swan cleans and cooks for men, accepts Edward's controlling behavior, and nearly dies carrying a half-vampire baby rather than terminating the pregnancy.

4. Body Ideals and Feminist Awakenings

Obsession with impossible physical ideals from literature can trigger unhealthy teenage dieting behaviours.

When first reading Gone With The Wind at sixteen, the author checked her twenty-six-inch waist against Scarlett's seventeen-inch waist, leading her to skip breakfast, feed lunch to ducks, and eat whole sticks of celery. This behavior relied on the negative calorie myth and ignored the reality that Vivien Leigh actually had a twenty-two-inch waist in the film, which still required starvation and corsetry. Spending a novel in love with someone who cannot or will not reciprocate makes unrequited love delusional and a waste of imagination. Scarlett's obsession with the boring Ashley Wilkes blinds her to Rhett Butler's genuine charm and devotion until much later in life.

Feminist Literature

Feminist literature from the 1970s provides a crucial wake-up call against domestic isolation and patriarchal expectations.

Books like Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch, Erica Jong's Fear of Flying, and Marilyn French's The Women's Room expose the grinding tedium of traditional marriage, domestic subservience, and the societal conditioning of women. The author read Germaine Greer in the school library and studied Marilyn French's detailed descriptions of 1950s housewifery to reinforce her choice to leave home and avoid traditional marriage. Religious upbringings and restrictive institutions instill a lingering sense of guilt that persists even after abandoning dogma. Through Antonia White's autobiographical novels following Nanda and Clara, the author learns that breaking away from severe religious frameworks leaves a permanent imprint of guilt regarding sin and non-conformity.

The author experienced intense guilt and even made herself vomit after eating a non-kosher prawn, explicitly remembering Nanda's exhaustive cataloging of venial sins. Religious or spiritual yearning in youth can mask a deeper artistic or personal vocation that does not require extreme asceticism. Franny Glass's breakdown over religious obsession with the Jesus Prayer mirrors the author's temptation to adopt an ultra-Orthodox lifestyle, and both are ultimately rescued by realizing their true calling is artistic expression and living fully in the world. Franny is pulled back from her psychological breakdown by her brother Zooey, who convinces her that her true religious act is to act as God's actress rather than retreating from life.

Becoming the heroine of one's own life requires rejecting external definitions imposed by parents, society, or partners. Drawing from Nora Ephron and various literary figures, the author concludes that true liberation means refusing to let anyone else define you, which requires deep self-knowledge, gumption, and the courage to stand alone. The author fought her parents for the right to leave home and go to university, using Scarlett O'Hara's optimism and the lessons of second-wave feminists to break out of her pink bedroom.

5. The Myth of Suffering and the Anti-Heroine

Young women often internalize the damaging cultural myth that profound suffering and angst are required to become a real woman or a serious artist.

Influenced by literature, memoirs, and music depicting tormented female figures, you can mistakenly court pain, heartbreak, and physical trauma, viewing them as valuable rites of passage. The author spent her first term at Cambridge waiting for a harrowing, transfiguring experience and mistakenly viewed her heartbreaking breakup and subsequent neurological seizures as romantic proof of suffering.

The Bell Jar and Anti-Heroines

Sylvia Plath's novel The Bell Jar provides an antidote to perfect-girl heroines by featuring an anti-heroine who rejects societal expectations and the pressure to be flawless. Esther Greenwood hates the fashion, make-up, and superficial expectations of her magazine internship, eventually descending into mental distress and suicidal despair because the pressure to be perfect makes her crazy.

In The Bell Jar, Esther drinks from a fingerbowl filled with cherry blossoms, assuming it is Japanese soup, and later attempts suicide after experiencing a series of mental and physical breakdowns.

The School of Pain

Victorian children's literature often propagated the harmful notion that physical illness and injury serve as moral instruction for young girls. Books like Susan Coolidge's 1872 novel What Katy Did feature saintly invalid characters who frame severe spinal injuries as an opportunity to attend God's School of Pain and learn patience and virtue.

In What Katy Did, Cousin Helen visits the paralyzed young Katy Carr and promises her that God is going to let her go to His school to learn beautiful things.

Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles presents a surface exemplar of a passive victim who is actually shrewd, strong-willed, and resistant to societal oppression. Hardy wrestled with how to portray Tess's plight without making her a complete victim, showing her fighting against a hypocritical society and eventually striking down her abuser.

At the end of the novel, Tess stabs Alec d'Urbervilles to death, and Hardy depicts the resulting bloodstain as a gigantic ace of hearts, signaling her victory as an avenging angel. Alice Walker's The Color Purple is often misread as a tale of suffering, but its true message centers on learning to demand pleasure, strength, and joy from life. Although the protagonist Celie endures horrific abuse, her journey culminates in self-realization, running her own business, and finding sexual pleasure and community through characters like Shug.

Shug helps Celie discover her own body by having her place a mirror between her legs to look at her wet rose.

Restored editions of Sylvia Plath's poetry collections can fundamentally alter the narrative arc from a suicide note to a story of recovery and future hope. Frieda Hughes's introduction to the restored edition of Ariel removes poems like Edge and rearranges the collection so that it begins with love and ends with spring, framing it as a recovery from a breakup. Frieda Hughes insisted in 1993 that her mother's memorial blue plaque reflect Plath's life rather than her death, placing it on the house where she wrote most of The Bell Jar instead of her final tragic address in 1963, matching the 1982 publication year of the Journals foreword.

6. Theatre, Ambition, and Provisional Readings

Provisional Readings

Readers often approach heroines seeking what they personally need at a specific point in their lives, making initial readings provisional.

Samantha Ellis explains that when she was twenty, she misread E.M. Forster's novel because she desperately needed an idea about becoming an artist and living an artist's life.

This misreading ultimately pushed her into writing her first plays. Samantha Ellis went to Florence just before her final year, channeling Helena Bonham-Carter from the film adaptation, and wrote her first play instead of having a romantic encounter.

Embracing passion and rejecting social propriety can catapult an individual directly into life, saving them from muddle and repression. Drawing on a phrase from A Room with a View regarding too much Beethoven, the author interprets it as an invitation to live bravely and authentically, avoiding Forster's ultimate bugbear of muddle. The author wanted to live as she played, steering clear of falseness, repression, propriety, and muddle.

Secondary characters who initially appear rigid and conventional can experience a late flowering into heroism by choosing to act against past mistakes. Re-evaluating Charlotte Bartlett from A Room with a View, the author realizes that Charlotte recognized her own past missed opportunities for happiness and chose to cut through the muddle to help unite Lucy and George. Thirty years before, Miss Bartlett experienced a similar chance at love. Charlotte Bartlett, who previously acted as an eternal chaperone and enforcer of correct behavior, steps up to help bring Lucy and George together.

Realities of Theatre

Pursuing a career in theatre requires intense pragmatism, hard work, and a rejection of the romanticized notion that artistic success comes effortlessly. Noel Streatfeild's novel Ballet Shoes teaches that talent alone is insufficient, and that attitude, relentless hard work, and dealing with the compromises of stage life are crucial for survival. Streatfeild spent ten years as a jobbing actress before writing her books, and she took three months to rehash her adult novel into Ballet Shoes. The character Petrova hates the theatre and wants to be an aviatrix, yet she works hard because vocation demands it, while other characters struggle against poverty and anxiety.

An author's initial cynical work can be transformed into a beloved classic when they begin to genuinely love their heroines and embrace a spirit of encouragement. Streatfeild's first success, The Whicharts, was a dark, cynical adult novel about the sordid side of the theatre, which she was later commissioned to rewrite into the sanitized children's book Ballet Shoes. Seven years marked the gap between the publication of Streatfeild's first hit and her commission for a children's book. When rewriting her earlier cynical novel into Ballet Shoes, Streatfeild excised sex and swearing, keeping the core dynamic of girls navigating the stage in this bowdlerised version.

Moralistic authors often stack the deck against their female protagonists, punishing them for theatrical ambitions and sexual autonomy. Herman Wouk's novel Marjorie Morningstar follows a young woman with theatrical dreams who is ultimately forced by the author's reactionary agenda to abandon her career, repent her sexual choices, and conform to suburban life. On page 417 of Marjorie Morningstar, the heroine's life turns toward regret and renunciation. Wouk describes Marjorie's first sexual experience as rough, humiliating, and akin to a physical deformity, culminating in her giving up the theatre to marry a conventional lawyer, trading her artistic dreams for a life as Shirley and a husband named Sidney.

7. Career Handbooks and Creative Breakthroughs

Subordinating your own ambitions to support self-absorbed men traps you in caretaking roles, whereas true independence requires prioritizing career mastery and talent.

Career Traps

You might find that your early jobs mirror Anne Welles in Jacqueline Susann's novel Valley of the Dolls. The timeline of the book spans from 1945 to 1965, presenting a bleak view of women's choices. Anne acts as a diligent secretary and constantly attaches herself to careless men like Lyon Burke, eventually falling into muse abuse.

Instead of writing your own plays, you might spend time temping as a receptionist, acting as an unpaid producer for friends, and editing low-quality manuscripts at a vanity press. Neely O'Hara offers a stark contrast by leveraging her theatrical talent and ignoring social niceties. Neely is already a veteran of vaudeville at age 17 and fights her way back to the top through sheer self-belief.

Neely gets fired from a show for upstaging the star Helen Lawson. She makes a loud scene in the office of Anne's boss, which successfully gets her rehired in an even bigger role.

Shirley Conran's novel Lace, published in 1983, shifts the focus from passive romance to rigorous professional competence. The story runs through a timeline from 1943 to 1980, following four heroines who meet in Switzerland and realize that work, money, and independence are what truly count.

Judy starts out as a frugal secretary in Paris using an electric iron as a stove before moving to New York and becoming the hottest press agent in the world by the age of twenty-three. Maxine travels first class bringing nine maroon leather suitcases. You can apply the survival tactics found in these pages directly to daily experiments:

Use an electric iron as a stove, setting it to linen for cooking eggs or toast, and wool for stews.

Creative Breakthroughs

When external relationships, status, and youthful looks inevitably fade, your own talent and self-reliance remain the only dependable anchors. Jennifer North looks 25 through drastic measures by the time she reaches age 40. Neely repeatedly overcomes career destruction, addiction, and public scandals by returning to her raw talent.

You can break free from passive habits by studying fierce, unapologetic female creators who channel their genuine anger into art. While researching theatrical history at an archive, the author studied Shelagh Delaney, the young playwright who shocked audiences in 1958 with A Taste of Honey. Delaney threw herself entirely into writing at a young age, portraying working-class realities without softening her perspective for critics.

Transitioning from safe perfectionism requires channeling personal experiences directly into creative work rather than seeking external approval. The author wrote a play titled Patching Havoc inspired by her first relationship. It featured a heroine who actively chooses to take a saved bat mitzvah cake out of the freezer to wreck it and start again.

8. Gothic Romances and Self-Respect

Treating destructive literary romances like Wuthering Heights as a template for real-life relationships leads to self-erasure and misery.

The author attempted to live by Wuthering Heights when she was twenty-nine, dating an alcoholic and later an oud player, trying to play the damsel in distress and hoping to save them, which only left her feeling like the unrequited and abused Isabella.

Jane Eyre offers a model of self-respect, emotional independence, and egalitarian partnership that contrasts with gothic self-destruction.

Jane courageously leaves Rochester after discovering his mad wife in the attic, declaring her absolute self-respect and refusing to stay as his mistress despite her temptation to do so.

Wuthering Heights Template

Emily wrote of untamed, impossible transcendence in Wuthering Heights. Heathcliff raises a hand to strike his daughter-in-law on page 28, hangs Isabella's dog, and rages about wanting to crush out the entrails of worms.

When read critically rather than purely for comfort, Cathy appears solipsistic and violent. Her decision to marry Edgar Linton is driven by snobbery and the lack of a viable alternative when Heathcliff vanishes without a forwarding address, leading to her permanent internal fracture after betraying her own heart.

Jane Eyre and Equality

Charlotte grounded her heroines in moral agency, social negotiation, and the possibility of a balanced, equal partnership. Jane sums up a period of ten years of marriage with companionable daily conversation.

Bertha Mason acts as Jane's dark double, destroying wedding veils and physically wrestling with Rochester, embodying the untamed passion and dark curly hair that signify unruliness. Jean Rhys expanded on this perspective in her prequel Wide Sargassa Sea, reimagining Bertha as Antoinette in a sensuous, oppressive colonial setting where she is driven mad by a controlling English husband in 1966.

Conclusion