‘Where are the happy fictional spinsters?’

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. But now, in her thirties, came an epiphany. She’d chosen the wrong heroine. This was understandable, given the ‘high drama’ of her family background, in the small community of north London Jews exiled from Baghdad. As she puts it:

An Iraqi Jewish endearment, fudwa, means ‘I would die for you’. In a five-minute phone call about yoghurt my grandma can offer to die for me ten or fifteen times.  So the Sturm und Drang of Heathcliff and Cathy’s love made sense to me.

Realising she should have backed Jane, it occurred to Ellis to revisit all her literary heroines and investigate their effect on her, for good and ill: ‘I hoped I’d still like them.  I hoped I wouldn’t end up thinking they’d ruined my life.’ First came the fairytales. The Sleeping Beauty was too passive, the Little Mermaid too sad — although the Disney version pleased her, with its happier ending, a singing career for the mermaid and a besotted prince, ‘incongruously named Eric’.

Anne of Green Gables, Little Women, A Little Princess and Ballet Shoes came next, some of them disappointing the grown-up Ellis with their heroines’ feebleness and inability to break out of the pre-feminist restrictions of their times. Clever Lizzy Bennet and headstrong Scarlett O’Hara pleased her more, although the latter’s long adulation of the ghastly Ashley made Ellis feel that loving ‘someone who can’t or won’t love her back is not heroic.