Quotes from Samantha Ellis's books, and about them
How to Be a Heroine on What Katy Did: “And maybe it had been imprinted even earlier by one of my favourite childhood novels: Susan Coolidge’s What Katy Did.”
How to Be a Heroine on Beyond Good and Evil: “He’d arrived in England with only his oud, cigarettes and a copy of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil.”
How to Be a Heroine on Prozac Nation: “In 1994 came Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation, with the author on the cover, hair tousled, pouting sulkily, fenced in by barbed wire made of pills.”
How to Be a Heroine on Sleeping Beauty: “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”
How to Be a Heroine on Grimms' Fairy Tales: “As a girl, I had thought of myself as being, like Catherine Morland in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, ‘in training for a heroine’, an activity I thought both important and worthwhile.”
How to Be a Heroine on Northanger Abbey: “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 h”
How to Be a Heroine on Wide Sargasso Sea: “I’d got more ammunition against Jane from Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, her intoxicating 1966 prequel to Jane Eyre.”
How to Be a Heroine on A Doll's House: “Watching Nora in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, being patronised by her husband, forced to pretend to be a featherbrain and an angel, a lark and a squirrel, while all the time she’d saved his life, I thought nothing was as sat”
How to Be a Heroine on Wuthering Heights: “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.”
How to Be a Heroine on Ballet Shoes: “But my first and best guide to the theatre was Ballet Shoes, Noel Streatfeild’s 1936 story of the Fossil girls making their way on the stage.”