How To Be A Heroine

by Samantha Ellis

  Romeo and Juliet made Lizzy’s victory feel almost too easy, almost a trick. I’d started to feel Lizzy’s happy ending could only happen in a novel with an author on hand to remove the obstacles just in time for the big finish. Without knowing it, I had stumbled upon the marriage plot – the classic narrative where mistakes and misunderstandings are resolved so the couple can marry at the end – and I didn’t like it. I was frustrated by the artifice, and by the idea that all a heroine had to do was get a man to marry her.

  Unless of course she died. All the heroines’ stories seemed to end in death or marriage. It seemed I could either be Lizzy, guided into Mr Darcy’s arms by Austen, or Juliet, killed off by Shakespeare, and all for a man who isn’t even worthy of her. I blamed Shakespeare for not giving her someone better, and for not saving her life. But not as much as I blamed Charles Dickens for letting Nancy Sykes get bludgeoned in Oliver Twist. I wondered, not for the last time, if these heroines were tragic because their authors were men. Dickens, in his readings of Oliver Twist, would try to make as many women faint as he could: when I heard that I spent a whole vengeful summer rewriting the book so that girls came out top. My heroine, Olivia Twist, became the queen of the Victorian underworld.

  Belatedly, I decided to try to drag my reading into the twentieth century to catch up with what my friends were reading, and to see if I could find a heroine who didn’t marry or die. I should have had a lot in common with Margaret Simon, the sweet heroine of Blume’s 1970 novel, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. She is half-Jewish, twelve and as anxious about growing up as she is excited. Like her, I prayed to God for things that probably weren’t strictly within His remit, like getting boys to dance with me. But she was desperate for her period to start and I was three years into mine and, unlike her, I didn’t want puberty to go any faster.

  My mother had just inducted me into perhaps the greatest mystery of Iraqi Jewish womanhood: depilation. The first time, she sugared my legs with a tub of sugar I was sure had come from Baghdad. This seems improbable, but then my family did bring some unlikely things when they left – including two rolling pins – and the sugar was certainly vintage. My mother heated it up and spread it over my legs. After a lot of ripping cotton and not a little pain, I emerged from the bathroom, splotchy, reeking of caramel and determined never to do it again – even if I grew fur like a bear and had to live in a cave. If this was womanhood, I didn’t want it.

  Compared to Margaret, I was painfully naïve. I would never have dreamed of kissing a boy at a party. When once, at a bar mitzvah, I stumbled into a room where a game of spin the bottle was in progress, I fled. I definitely didn’t do any of the things in Forever, the Blume book everyone else was reading. The one with all the sex in. The one without God in the title. I was still a dutiful daughter. I confided in my diary that even if it made my friends hate me, I was determined not to have sex before marriage because ‘that’s just what I feel’. Like I said, I was an earnest child. And by the time I read Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, my friends had already moved on to reading Jilly Cooper’s Riders under their desks. Not me, though. Riders was a step too far. I was scared off by the cover, featuring a male hand on a woman’s tight white breeches.

  Now, curious about the girl I might have been if I hadn’t been such a coward, I get hold of a copy. The cover image is the same as in 1987, and the blurb promises that Riders is the first, and steamiest, in her series which is called, incredibly, the Rutshire Chronicles. Not that I’d suspected Cooper of subtlety, but still. I make a cup of tea and get stuck in.

  And I can’t put it down. This despite groan-worthy puns, retro-sexism, far too much about horses, and a narrative that stretches out for 918 pages (Pride and Prejudice comes in under 300). When Cooper wants to be funny, she’s hilarious. When a man strips prawns for his date, she asks ‘Do you undress women as expertly?’ and he replies, ‘Far more expertly, and I don’t pull their heads and legs off, either.’ The heroines are bewitching and perpetually trolleyed (they’re always on crash diets so a sniff of champagne goes straight to their heads), the men are cads, the horses are neurotic, and Cooper writes with such relish that you can’t help but warm to her. My friends go wistful when I say what I’m reading. ‘I’ve lost days of my life to Jilly,’ they say. ‘I’ve lost weeks.’ ‘I’ve lost years.’

  Discovering Cooper is like joining a cult. There’s a drinking game where, as you read her novels, you drink a shot every time a dog or horse dies dramatically, toast the Queen whenever a member of the royal family shows up, have ‘a teeny tiny sip’ every time you’re pained by a pun. The game ends when you’re drunk enough to read on without shame. In another writer, the repetition would be boring, but there’s a comforting familiarity to the returning tropes: women splashing scent over themselves, the adjective ‘bootfaced’, wild garlic as a metonym for spring.

  The sex is alarming. There’s so much of it. When I get to the infamous scene where Rupert Campbell-Black comes like a train, I laugh. And a lot of the sex is played for laughs. When Helen meets Rupert, he’s hunting foxes and she’s with the hunt saboteurs (caricatured as fat, vegetarian and filthy), and he gets her attention when he pulls a horn from her cleavage. If I had been brave enough to read Riders when all my friends did, the humour might have made the sex less intimidating. And maybe Helen would have been my heroine. She loves books, especially Romeo and Juliet. She even uses the same library as me. In the reading room, quiet and dense with erudition, like me, sometimes, she feels as trapped as a bluebottle slamming into a window. And then this happens:

  ‘Have you any books on copulation?’ said a voice.

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t work here,’ said Helen. Then she started violently, for there, tanned and gloriously unacademic, stood Rupert.

  If I thought there was any danger of that happening, I’d go to the library more.

  But while Austen’s humour mirrors Lizzy’s, Cooper seems to turn on Helen. She becomes a house-proud neurotic and finds it hard to relax with Rupert, who is flagrantly unfaithful, and who wants her to be as liberated as he is, and even have orgies. He calls her frigid, ‘a frozen chicken. Fucking you is like stuffing sausage meat into a broiler. I’m always frightened I’ll discover the giblets.’ This is even worse than Mr Darcy saying Lizzy is ‘tolerable’. Poor Helen does eventually achieve sexual pleasure, but it doesn’t last. And she never finishes writing her book. I’m not sure she really can be my heroine.

  The only feminist in the book is a walking cliché, who doesn’t wear bras or deodorant, or eat meat, or shave her legs or armpits, names her daughter Germaine and Kate (after Greer and Millett) and pursues Rupert with nymphomaniac lust. Then there’s Janey, who is messy, uninhibited and actually has a job, but is too bitchy and brainless to like. The only heroine who has a proper journey is Fen, who goes from freckled pony-mad child to Olympic showjumping star, but I don’t think even as a tween I would have identified with her; she isn’t always very kind. I do like Fen’s sister Tory, though. She secretly eats cornflakes with double cream in bed (such decadence!), hates being a debutante, and wishes she lived in the seventeenth century and could be painted by Rubens and considered beautiful. She coolly buys a horse for the man she fancies – plucky, brooding Jake, who takes her to bed and finds her ‘splendid’ without her clothes on. Susie Orbach would be so proud.

  But Cooper doesn’t let Tory stay splendid. She winds up sad, patient and dull. Jake cheats on her, she poisons herself, and then it’s supposedly all OK because depression and attempted suicide have made her thin. What more could a woman want? Body-fascist Jake visits her in hospital where ‘she’d lost so much weight since he’d seen her. Her face, still flushed from the belladonna, gave an illusion of health. Long lashes swept her hollowed cheeks. All Jake could think was how beautiful she looked.’ So, to keep your husband, you have to starve and poison yourself?

  If I had read it back then, Riders would have scared me witless. And I’m not sure I would have found it useful to l
earn what a certain kind of man likes a woman to order for lunch (pâté, steak, green salad); that I should live on grapefruit in the run-up to a date, so I’d be thin and liable to get tipsy and lascivious on one glass of wine, and use freesias to mask the telltale spinster smell of cat. I don’t know what I’d have made of the information about how to ice my nipples for a lover, and that when running away from my psychotic showjumping husband with my sexy (but still showjumping) lover, I should make sure to pack hot tongs, heated rollers and hairdryer. On the whole, I’m glad I waited to read my first bonkbuster. (Having started, though, I can’t stop. Racing for a train to rehearse a play in Edinburgh, I pick up Rivals, and read it all the way to Scotland.)

  If I were twelve or thirteen now, I’d be reading the Twilight novels. Now, attracted by the book’s covers with their campy Gothic script and the image of a blood-red apple in ice-white hands, I tear through all four of them. Vampires fascinate me, but the heroines of vampire novels aren’t usually much to get excited about. They seem to waft around a lot, in white. At first Stephenie Meyer seems to have bucked the trend with Bella Swan. She’s angry all the time, hates being the new girl in her dad’s rain-sodden town, and falls for the boy I would totally have gone for too. Edward is Darcy-esque in his disdain. But Bella is accident-prone and he keeps on rescuing her, so she knows he must love her! And he does. He loves her so much he can’t trust himself to be near her. Not because he might ruin her in the old sense, but because he’s a vampire, and if he kissed her he wouldn’t be able to stop, and she’d soon be undead too. So she’s the one wanting to be kissed and he’s the one saying no – an interesting reversal – and Meyer has a lot of fun making Edward a nice vampire, whose family have sworn off human blood. His father’s even a doctor, in a hospital, around blood all day long and nobly never drinking a drop. Meyer is very keen on praising his amazing restraint. But as the novels go on, it turns out this is because she’s a practising Mormon and she’s got an agenda that gets more and more intrusive. Miserably I slog through the last book, the vexing Breaking Dawn, bombarded by pro-abstinence, pro-marriage, anti-abortion messages, and some very reactionary views on men and women. Bella is constantly cleaning and cooking for men, and wanting to be rescued and ravished. Edward gets controlling and stalkerish, and Meyer calls this caring. He’s allowed to patronise Bella because he’s a century older. Bella sometimes stands her ground, but only on issues Meyer is interested in. So when her half-vampire baby is drinking her blood from the inside (ughhhhh), she goes to the brink of death rather than terminate the pregnancy. By the end she’s so abject and smug that I don’t care what happens to her or her ridiculously named child, Renesmee.

  It’s when I find myself wondering what Lizzy would make of Twilight, and hoping she’d agree with me, that I realise she’s never truly been supplanted in my affections. And a little research in the library (sadly unmolested by sexy showjumpers) makes me see that I misjudged Austen. The reason she preserved her anonymity and hid her writing was that she was shy. Like Mr Darcy, she was awkward, self-conscious and reserved. She was the one who didn’t perform to strangers.

  While she was writing the first draft of Pride and Prejudice, she was in love with the charming Irish lawyer Tom Lefroy. That’s why the book is so effervescently optimistic. Like the Bennets, the Lefroys had had five daughters, and no money. But their situation was even more extreme because Tom Lefroy’s father lived in hope of inheriting from a rich uncle, who he feared would cut him off if he knew he had married a woman without a dowry – unless they had a son. So the Lefroy parents spent ten years married secretly, trying for sons, and only having daughters, before finally they produced Tom.

  He needed a rich wife. But that didn’t stop Austen from hoping he’d defy his family and choose her. And maybe they did consider doing something rash. His parents had married secretly, after all. Austen’s juvenilia is full of elopements. She and Tom Lefroy almost certainly never set off for Gretna Green, as Anne Hathaway does in Becoming Jane, but maybe it crossed her mind. Maybe she knew how it felt to be Lydia.

  Much later, between writing the first draft of Pride and Prejudice at 20, and rewriting it when she was 37, Austen got two proposals, one from a man as rich as Darcy and the second from a perfectly respectable clergyman. She refused both men, even though she was in dire financial straits. I wonder if writing Lizzy gave her the guts to reject those two wrong proposals. I wonder if Lizzy made her brave.

  4

  SCARLETT O’HARA

  THE MAIN THING I remember about Scarlett O’Hara is the measurement of her waist: a cool seventeen inches. When I first read Gone With The Wind at sixteen, I raided my mum’s sewing box for a tape measure and checked. My waist was 26 inches – nine more than Scarlett’s, and we were the same age! I started skipping breakfast and feeding my lunch to the ducks. I ate whole sticks of celery because of the negative calorie myth (that eating it burned more calories than were contained in the celery itself). Later, I would decide dieting was for retro-sexists and give up celery in disgust; later still, I would discover it’s actually quite delicious. Then, I didn’t know a seventeen-inch waist was impossible without luck, starvation and aggressive corsetry; I didn’t know even tiny Vivien Leigh’s waist was 22 inches. The damage was done. I had started worrying about what I looked like.

  Luckily, I got something better from Scarlett: the strength to fight for independence. On any normal index of teenage rebellion, I would score very low. I was a good girl. But I was the only girl I knew in my community who wanted to go away to university rather than stay at home and go to university in London, so I became, if not quite a rebel, a pioneer. I started having secrets. I started writing my diary in Cyrillic so my parents couldn’t read it. (The joke’s on me because now I can barely read it. My Russian teacher was right when she said Cyrillic looks like chestnut hedges.) I got angry.

  Recently I was watching The Taming of the Shrew and when the shrew, Kate, raged across the stage, her father shrugged and threw up his hands as if to say ‘What can I do with such a daughter?’ This was how I felt at sixteen, except that no Petruchio turned up to tame me or save me (depending on how you interpret the play). My parents wanted me to get a degree, but they wanted me to do it at home, where they could keep an eye on me, and send me on dates with their friends’ sons. They didn’t want me to risk my safety, health and reputation to go God-knew-where, and study God-knew-what. For my sixteenth birthday my mother filled my bedroom with pink helium balloons. I woke in a thicket of ribbons topped with fluorescent clouds. Her own sixteenth had not been sweet, so she was determined mine would be fantastic. And it was. But I also felt trapped by her expectations.

  Scarlett O’Hara has similar issues with her mother. Ellen O’Hara is a saint, scented with lemon verbena, dressed in silk, always doing good deeds. Her back never touches the back of any chair, and like all great ladies she knows how to carry her burden while retaining her charm. But Scarlett has always ‘found the road to ladyhood hard’. I passionately identified with this, and felt vindicated when later in the book Margaret Mitchell reveals that Ellen too chafed at ladyhood, and only got married after her first love, her wild, flashing-eyed cousin, was killed. When she dies calling out his name, poor Scarlett has no idea who he is, or how much she and her mother might have had in common, if only she’d known.

  I found Ellen a cold fish, with her austere beauty, strict morals and ‘utter lack of humour’. But I understood Scarlett wanting to live up to her, deciding, like some hoop-skirted St Augustine, that she will be a great lady, one day . . . but not yet.

  I also read the book for tips on how to flirt. Scarlett ‘smiled when she spoke, consciously deepening her dimple and fluttering her bristly black lashes as swiftly as butterflies’ wings’. I tried this in the mirror but it didn’t work, so I went back to putting toothpaste on my spots as advised by Just Seventeen. Perhaps this would get me closer to a relationship with someone like Ashley Wilkes, the object of Scarlett’s flirtation.

&nb
sp; Ashley seemed a noble figure, then, but he’s not. He’s a milquetoast. Even Scarlett admits to herself that his conversation bores her. Then, I foolishly thought he wouldn’t bore me, because unlike Scarlett, I liked talking about books. In truth, I was less like Scarlett and more like her rival, Melanie, who talks Thackeray with the boys – which makes Scarlett giggle and scoff that she’s a bluestocking. Scarlett later turns out to be dazzling at maths and business, but she’s careful to hide her cleverness from men. And she has no time for literature; she’s much too hard-nosed.