How to Be a Heroine: Or, what I've learned from reading too much
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.11 (778 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0701187514 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 272 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2017-12-30 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
"Informative and entertaining mash of memoir and literary criticism" according to A. Reid. This is an interesting hybrid. Is it a personal memoir filtered through the lens of a raft of feminist literary criticism? Or feminist literary criticism filtered through the lens of one reader's life? Either way you take it, it's good.As memoirs go, it's a bit on the light side, as Ellis's insights into her life and state of mind are interspersed throughout with recounting of plots of the books she's read and examinations o. "You Can't Take the Book Out of the Woman" according to L. M Young. Eat, sleep, breathebooks. This is for everyone who has felt kinship with the literary characters they grew up with, and how they have shaped, whether or not we realize it, who we are and how we think. Ellis grew up reading the classics and loving their authors and characters, from LITTLE WOMEN to Sylvia Plath, from WHAT KATY DID and Anne Shirley to Cathy Earnshaw and the ladies of VALLEY OF THE DOLLS, books that were sometim. Left feeling argumentative I value all interpretations of literature. That said, I also have the ability to disagree with interpretations, and of all the books she discusses (that I, too, have read), I strongly question her conclusions. I wonder just how in depth she read them? I'm curious as to how she could enjoy them with these interpretations? I agree that enjoying a book and seeing how it's problematic is entirely possible, but reading her though
SAMANTHA ELLIS is a playwright and journalist. . She lives in London. From an early age she knew she didn'’t want their version of a happy ending -- marriage to a nice Iraqi-Jewish boy -- so she read books to find out what she did want. The daughter of Iraqi-Jewish refugees, she grew up thinking her family had travelled everywhere by magic carpet. Her plays include
She’'s a drip). And that’s when she 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 -- and harder –-- at all the heroines she'’d loved through her life, from her earliest obsessions with the Little Mermaid and Anne of Green Gables; and then on to Scarlett O’Hara, Sylvia Plath, the Dolls (of the Valley); and later Riders, Buffy, Flora Poste from Cold Comfort Farm and many, many more. These were the girls, the women, the books, that had shaped her ideas of how to live, of what kind of woman she wanted to be. Some of her heroines lived up to the scrutiny (she will always love Lizzy Bennet); some of them most decidedly did not (thought Katy Carr from What Katy Did was a caref
• "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." --Daisy Goodwin, Sunday Times