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Books

'Where are the happy fictional spinsters?'

In How to Be a Heroine, Samantha Ellis looks at the literary heroines who shaped her life — and finally finds one she can use as her role model

18 January 2014

9:00 AM

18 January 2014

9:00 AM

How to be a Heroine, or What I’ve Learned from Reading Too Much Samantha Ellis

Chatto, pp.250, £16.99, ISBN: 9780701187514

This book arose from an argument. Lifelong bookworm Samantha Ellis and her best friend had gone to Brontë country and were tramping about on the Yorkshire moors when they began bickering: would it be better to be Cathy Earnshaw, or Jane Eyre? Ellis had always been fervently in the Cathy camp, re-reading Wuthering Heights every year (often in the bath) and swooning.

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