How sibling rivalry made Anne the 'neglected' Brontë

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How sibling rivalry made Anne the ‘neglected’ Brontë

Or, what I’ve learned from reading too much

How To Be A Heroine

A funny, touching, inspiring exploration of the role of heroines, and our favourite books, in all our lives.

Any woman with a remotely bookish childhood will find great pleasure in How to be a Heroine... like Ellis, I find it reassuring that Lizzy Bennet can admit that she was wrong about Darcy, have used Scarlett's indomitable mantra in times of adversity, and have every sympathy with the women who keep their bank accounts separate as in Lace

This is quite simply a genius idea for a book.... A fantastically inspirational memoir that makes you want to reread far too many books

Brilliant... From Lizzy Bennet to 'go-getting Judy Jordan' from Lace, Samantha Ellis did what we all do, mostly without realising: tried other people's lives on for size in literature

The best kind of book: one that I gobbled up, wanting to go slow to savour it but unable to stop reading until it was all gone. One that made me want to run to the bookshop to buy copies of novels I’ve never got round to reading and devour those, too

It's not so much self-help as shelf-help, as Ellis applies fresh insights to her own life dilemmas and proffers some inspiring solutions to everyday problems. A truly brilliant read

A treasure-trove of once beloved characters, if you spent your childhood and adolescence with your head in a book, you'll love How To Be A Heroine

An honest and open-hearted book by someone whose life has been informed and enriched by her reading

Samantha Ellis, a playwright brought up in London in an Iraqi-Jewish family, offers herself up in this warm-spirited biblio-autobiography... She is endearingly open about her vulnerabilities, superstitions, love tangles and defeats and is adept at droll asides

This warm, witty memoir is perfect if you're the kind of woman for whom the Louisa May Alcott quote, "She is too fond of books and it has turned her head" reverberates... At the end of the day, this is a life-affirming feminist text, but one delivered with such dexterity and sly humour that it never feels like a polemic or prescription, making it well worth your time

It fizzes along, thanks to Ellis's warm humour and interesting back story... Plus, how could we resist a book that reminisces about Judy Blume novels?

Ellis not only makes you want to go and re-read your own teenage canon but to recapture that mode of absorbing novels... If this is a defence of "reading for wisdom", then the wisdom in her own writing makes an eloquent testimony

How to Be a Heroine is an honest, warm and readable book about the plots we follow in order to make sense of our lives, the selves we adopt as we grow up and the selves we shed... Wise, courageous and endlessly generous, Ellis is something of a heroine herself.

I was a bookworm as a child, and practically everything I learnt about life came from fiction... If you did too, then this is the book for you

How To Be A Heroine happily reminds all bookworms of years of their life spent in the company of Scarlett, Katy, Jane Eyre, the March family and all those wonderful friends that only really exist in our hearts.

Listen up, ladies: it's never too late to become your own heroine. This warm, spry tale of a textual coming of age leads the way through a gallery of literary role models, introducing and reintroducing warriors and worriers, spinsters and seductresses. Plucked from the pages of authors from Jane Austen to Jilly Cooper, there are heroines here to make you bold, make you laugh, and make you mad. They'll all get you thinking.

A thoughtful, celebratory book that leaves you believing Ellis enjoyed writing it as much as you'll enjoy reading it

[A] vivid, passionate study of literary heroines

How to be a Heroine is Samantha's funny, touching, inspiring exploration of the role of heroines, and our favourite books, in all our lives

This book is at its best and most amusing in the autobiographical passages which describe the author’s volatile and close-knit family and her place within it

Funny and thoughtful, this will have you remembering your favourite characters when younger – and perhaps have you reaching for a reread

Ellis is a nimble, effervescent storyteller... Anyone who expresses an interest in Eat, Pray, Love should be handed this book instead

Ellis' tone is warm and welcoming – like chatting to a big sister ... there’s a nice mixture of stories you’ll recognise, as well as more niche books which I’ll now be rooting out like a pig seeking literary truffles

A joy to read. Well written, and engaging on her own story, Ellis analyses books often dismissed as childish or light in an intelligent but never pretentious manner

Ellis proves funny and thoughtful, alive both to the indulgence of reading (preferably in the bath, with a glass of wine) and to her own capacity for false enchantment. Her synopses are always lively and perceptive but she’s at her best when she gets stuck in to interrogating her characters

An utter joy to read: a whirlwind walk down memory lane

A delight. It’s a memoir-slash-accessible-literary-criticism, slash-your-next-read

Fascinating and insightful... This is a book that can teach so much about the self; it can make struggles so wound up in the past and in the novels that stay with you come clear. Nostalgic, warming and a stern lesson for life, How to Be a Heroine should be on everyone’s bookshelf

A wonderful summary of all the different literary heroines she has  loved, from Anne Of Green Gables to some interesting downmarket choices,  like Valley Of The Dolls. She makes me think there are about five books  I have to re-read immediately, starting with Wuthering Heights.

Ellis’s sensitive and witty analyses reflect the power classic fictional  heroines have not only to inspire but also – as in Jane’s Eyre’s case –  to endlessly surprise, even horrify

A charming, amusing autobiography told through the classic literary heroines

One of my 2014 new best books, without doubt, has been Samantha Ellis’s wonderful How To Be A Heroine: Or What I’ve Learned From Reading Too Much

Ellis’s journey of reading and self-discovery offers a fresh perspective on the classics

The daughter of Iraqi-Jewish refugees, Samantha Ellis is the author of the books How to be a Heroine and Take Courage and her plays include How to Date a Feminist, Cling to me Like Ivy and Operation Magic Carpet. Her journalism has appeared in the Guardian, TLS, Spectator, Literary Review and more. She worked on both Paddington films. She lives in London.

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, passionate Cathy; but her friend found Cathy silly, a snob, 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? It's Melanie), joyous reunions (Anne of Green Gables), poignant memories (Sylvia Plath) and tearful goodbyes (Lucy Honeychurch). And then there was Jilly Cooper... 
 
How To Be A Heroine is Samantha’s 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.

on losing and preserving culture

Chopping Onions on My Heart

A wonderfully immersive and sensitive meditation on belonging and identity

VIV GROSKOP, author of How to Own the Room

A book about loss written with pure, irrepressible joy... Urgent, alive, propulsive. I adored it

MARINA BENJAMIN, author of Last Days of Babylon

Samantha’s mother tongue is dying out. An urgent need to find out more becomes an expansive investigation into how to keep hold of her culture -- and when to let it go 
 
The daughter of Iraqi-Jewish refugees, Samantha grew up surrounded by the noisy, vivid, hot sounds of Judeo-Iraqi Arabic. A language that’s now on the verge of extinction. 
 
The realisation that she won’t be able to tell her son he’s ‘living in the days of the aubergines’ or ‘chopping onions on my heart’ opens the floodgates. The questions keep coming. How can she pass on the stories of displacement without passing on the trauma? Will her son ever love mango pickle? 
 
In her search for answers Samantha encounters demon bowls, the perils of kohl and the unexpected joys of fusion food. Her journey transports us from the clamour of Noah’s Ark to the calm of the British Museum, from the Oxford School of Rare Jewish Languages to the banks of the River Tigris. As Samantha considers what we lose and keep, she also asks what we might need to let go of to preserve our culture and ourselves. 
 
This is a life-affirming memoir about resilience and repair, and the healing power of dancing to our ancestors’ music, cooking up their recipes and sharing their stories.

Samantha Ellis

Anne Bronte and the Art of Life

'I was wowed and moved' Tracy Chevalier 
 
Anne Brontë is the forgotten Brontë sister, overshadowed by her older siblings - virtuous, successful Charlotte, free-spirited Emily and dissolute Branwell. Tragic, virginal, sweet, stoic, selfless, Anne. The less talented Brontë, the other Brontë. 
 
Take Courage is Samantha's personal, poignant and surprising journey into the life and work of a woman sidelined by history. A brave, strongly feminist writer well ahead of her time - and her more celebrated siblings - and who has much to teach us today about how to find our way in the world.

Samantha Ellis

Take Courage

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