How To Be A Heroine

by Samantha Ellis

  Flora’s been left a hundred pounds a year, not enough to live on, so she decides to go and live with her relatives. She writes to them all, and chooses to go to the Starkadders first, because they have a spare room for her and she won’t have to share. How sound and sensible she is! And not just about choosing accommodation. Flora is a very cosy heroine. She’s always surrounding herself with creature comforts. Not fancy things, but bread and butter and jam, hot baths and warm rugs. And despite her enviable sprezzatura, she does have a sort of plan; ‘when I am fifty-three or so,’ she says, ‘I would like to write a novel as good as Persuasion, but with a modern setting, of course. For the next thirty years or so I shall be collecting material for it.’ In the film, which is blissful, Kate Beckinsale is constantly scribbling. Her writing inspiration is Austen, who she thinks was just like her: ‘She liked everything to be tidy and pleasant and comfortable about her, and so do I. You see . . . unless everything is tidy and pleasant and comfortable all about one, people cannot even begin to enjoy life. I cannot endure messes.’

  Flora hopes her relatives will have messes or miseries for her to tidy up, and wow, they don’t disappoint. At decrepit Cold Comfort Farm everyone is kept just this side of suicidal by Aunt Ada Doom who once saw something nasty in the woodshed and has been off her head ever since. She runs the farm from her bed, where she finds time to enjoy five meals a day. Flora tartly observes that if she is mad, it’s a very pleasant and convenient sort of madness. In fact, she suspects that the melodramatic Starkadders rather enjoy ‘doors being slammed, and jaws sticking out, and faces white with fury, and faces brooding in corners, and faces making unnecessary fuss at breakfast, and plenty of opportunities for gorgeous emotional wallowings, and partings for ever, and misunderstandings’. Flora does not enjoy these things. She is poised and tranquil. One of her first innovations is to introduce afternoon tea to Cold Comfort Farm. She’s as cool as the eau de cologne she dabs on her temples at tough times.

  She was the perfect antidote to my unsuccessful experiments with tempestuous love. Gazing out at falling snow from my studio, I daydreamed an encounter between Flora Poste and Cathy Earnshaw in the kitchen at Wuthering Heights. It would be snowing there too. Cathy would race in, soaked to the skin, hair wild, neglecting to shut the door. Flora would get up from her chair by the roaring fire to do it. She’d bring Cathy warm, dry clothes, and a restorative cup of tea. If Cathy dashed her head against the furniture and made long speeches, Flora would wait. Perhaps she might sigh. Or use the time to freshen up her lipstick. Cathy would think her empty-headed, but Flora wouldn’t care. She would be sympathetic but firm. She would slash through the muddle and help Cathy see clearly. She might even help her to be happy. Because Flora’s great skill is to find out what is gnawing at people and make it stop.

  She solves all the Starkadders’ problems, starting with Meriam, who thinks she’s doomed to get pregnant every time the sukebind is in flower; Flora breezily introduces her to contraception. (The sukebind, incidentally, is a fictional, smelly flower, invented by Gibbons, along with such ruralisms as ‘clettering’ and ‘mollocking’; part of the book’s pleasure comes from knowing it must have been so much fun to write.) Flora pokes gentle fun at the Starkadders, from wildfire preacher Amos (‘there’ll be no butter in hell!’) to Mr Mybug, who has come to Sussex to write. Men who write in books by women are usually villains, and Mr Mybug is worse than most because he’s (again!) trying to prove that Branwell wrote all his sisters’ books (even The Tenant of Wildfell Hall). Mr Mybug’s so sex-obsessed he can’t go for a walk without pointing out phallic trees, bosomy hills and nipple-like buds. Flora faces all this preposterousness with lucid calm. When she asks her cousin Judith about getting her curtains washed, Judith replies (first sinking into a reverie): ‘Curtains? Child, child, it is many years since such trifles broke across the web of my solitude.’ Flora briskly asks if she could have them washed all the same, then pragmatically organises it herself. She is not the kind of heroine to put up with dirty curtains.

  At dark moments I fear I am more Judith than Flora. Judith has hair like black snakes (yes, dark and curly) and always looks as if she’s on stage. Like all the Starkadders she is in the grip of a painful idée fixe: her unhealthy obsession with her ludicrously handsome son Seth. (In the film, Rufus Sewell leavens Seth’s lazy beefcake insolence with an ironic glint in his eye that makes him even more irresistible.) Flora dispatches Judith to be psychoanalysed by a helpful friend – Flora has a friend for every occasion, as every single woman should, and is always getting her pals to send her amusing letters, or gumboots, or magazines, or to deal with unhappy relatives. Another friend is a film producer who whisks Seth off to Tinseltown to make him a matinee idol; which is, conveniently, Seth’s dream come true.

  Like Anne Shirley but with more style and less chatter, Flora is an altruist. She transforms the Starkadders’ lives. Even the farm ends up clean and pretty, and she’s so pleased, she says to herself, ‘I did all that with my little hatchet’. Which makes me want to cheer, and perhaps buy her a fortifying fruitcake. At the wedding at the end of the book (not her wedding, I hasten to add), she’s delighted to see the Starkadders enjoying themselves – and for normal, happy reasons, not because they are in the midst of self-made melodramas. Her main aim is for people to enjoy themselves. When, later that evening, she feels a bit flat, she calls an amusing and attractive man she’s been flirting with by letter all the way through, and he picks her up in his plane. As they fly off literally into the sunset, she joyously praises his ‘heavenly teeth’. It’s a very Flora thing to notice and derive pleasure from, and it struck me that being single would mean taking responsibility for enjoying myself, not waiting to be entertained, or trying to live my life by entertaining someone else. That Purim at the colony, another playwright and I held a party. We read from our plays, and cross-dressed (dollar-shop tiaras for the men, charcoal moustaches for the women) and obeyed the Talmudic injunction to drink till we didn’t know the difference between good and evil. I felt a lot more like Vashti than like Esther. Even better, I felt like Flora, too.

  Back in London, the oud player and I broke up. I emerged from the wreckage determined to learn the art of being single and happy. Flora would show me how.

  On Valentine’s Day, I bought a power drill, to mark the new can-do, self-sufficient me, and when I gouged an enormous hole in the wrong bit of my wall I wasn’t downcast but did what Flora would, and called a friend. He sorted out the wall, I made us dinner, and we both had a lovely time. I felt that Flora would approve. I aimed for enjoyment. I tried new recipes. I walked miles every day, I played with my friends’ children. I wrote a play about my seizures, and it went on at a theatre in Cambridge. Just writing it was enormously clarifying and helpful. So much so, that a friend suggested I call it How I Learned to Stop Standing Up And Fell In Love With Falling Over. (I did not.) But I did stop trying to get the seizures cured, and started trying to learn to live with them instead, which meant that for the first time in fifteen years I wasn’t at the mercy of each new drug with its unpredictable side effects, and I was out of the hope–despair–hope cycle too. I got a commission to make a play with twenty-four actors-in-training who challenged and provoked and inspired me all at once. I learned to knit. I stopped watching old episodes of Sex and the City and instead my comfort programme became 30 Rock; it felt good to abandon Carrie Bradshaw, who now felt sappy and boy-crazy, for Liz Lemon, who, in a seminal episode, becomes terrified that she will choke alone in her flat and die. But when she does start to choke, home alone, she bravely launches herself into the back of a chair, dislodging the food stuck in her gullet, and with it the fear of being single.

  But still, I felt sad, sad that my relationship hadn’t worked, and sad that my idea of love had proved wrong. Cold Comfort Farm couldn’t help me. Its sunny ending started to seem forced and fake. It was practically deus ex machina, with a hero literally descending in a plane to rescue Flora. It was all too convenient to be tru
e, and too perfect. There was a smugness about it I didn’t like. There was a smugness about Flora too. I started resenting her modernising and sanitising and tidying everything up – especially the way she makes her cousin Elfine, a fanciful girl who likes dancing on the Downs in fog, ‘groomed and normal’ and marries her off to the local squire. Like he’s such a catch. And why does Elfine have to stop writing poetry? Her work may be bad but she’s only seventeen, and has plenty of time to improve. And isn’t it hypocritical of Flora to squash Elfine’s creative ambitions while nurturing her own? When Flora congratulates herself, after Elfine’s makeover, on being ‘an artist in living flesh’, and when she tells the squire’s mother that Elfine ‘can be moulded into exactly what you would wish her to be’, she sounds superior and manipulative. It’s all a bit Emma, and Emma Woodhouse is my least favourite Austen heroine – so interfering and know-it-all, so mean to spinsters! Replaying my daydream of Flora and Cathy in the kitchen at Wuthering Heights, I realised that the person Flora reminded me of most was Nelly Dean. And I never, ever wanted to be Nelly Dean.

  So I turned to the eponymous heroine of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s transgressive 1926 debut Lolly Willowes. At 47, she escapes being a maiden aunt by selling her soul to the devil and becomes a witch.

  Laura (her real name) has a quiet country childhood, then keeps house for her father, and wants nothing more than to go on long walks, find herbs in hedgerows, make cures and ointments, and read. But when she is 28, her father dies, and she is parcelled off to live with her brother and his wife. Life there is stultifying. Laura thinks her sisters-in-law look dead. One resembles a memorial urn, and the other keeps her linen preternaturally tidy because she wants to emulate the way Christ’s grave clothes were folded. Laura is repulsed, but doesn’t say anything. She’s not a rebel. She doesn’t escape into marriage, either. She scares off her only suitor (a snob who wants a well-trained wife) by telling him she thinks he might be a werewolf (a line I fully intend to try one day). After that, she lives ‘an existence doled out’ by her family. She copes by constructing ‘a sort of mental fur coat’ of small pleasures like roasted chestnuts eaten in bed, fancy soaps, marrons glacés, extravagant bunches of flowers, second-hand books. All single women should have a ‘mental fur coat’; after reading Lolly Willowes, I compiled my own list of small pleasures, like reading a book in a hot bath scented with orange flower water, walks on Hampstead Heath and pistachio baklava.

  Twenty years go by. Laura’s niece who, as an infant, nicknamed her Lolly in the first place, is all grown up. She has married twice and driven lorries in the war, and thinks her aunt is terribly un-enterprising for living such a limited life, on the margins of everyone else’s. Poor Laura has been tamed and subdued into becoming an indispensable maiden aunt. A bit odd, maybe, but still so useful that she’s never allowed to stray. She looks likely to moulder on for ever that way.

  But one day she’s at a greengrocer’s, buying flowers, and suddenly has a vision of an old woman, alone, picking fruit in her own orchard. The grocer gives her a spray of beech leaves with her flowers and says they’re from the Chilterns, and something in Laura ignites. She buys a guidebook and a map and announces that she is moving to Great Mop. (Sadly there is no such village, but there is one called Mop End, and I can confirm that its beech woods are divine.) Her brother blusters, ‘Lolly! I cannot allow this. You are my sister. I consider you my charge. I must ask you once and for all to drop this idea. It is not sensible. Or suitable.’ But she insists ‘Nothing is impracticable for a single, middle-aged woman with an income of her own’ – go, Laura! – and that’s when he pales and starts mansplaining that he’s lost most of her inheritance on a bad investment. She goes anyway, with what money she has, and soon she’s settling in at Great Mop. She doesn’t bother being bitter, or having regrets. And she doesn’t waste time on trying to nobly forgive her ‘tyrants’ as she calls them. Instead, she rejects all masculine institutions – including the law, the Church, the Bank of England and (startlingly) prostitution. She doesn’t need or care about them. She pleases herself. She goes for walks. She sleeps outdoors. She bakes scones in the shape of the Great Mop villagers. If there’s one thing a lone ranger can and should do it’s indulge her idiosyncrasies. It’s quite an achievement to make even scones subversive.

  Laura has to show her strength when her independence is challenged. Her nephew Titus comes to visit and likes Great Mop so much he decides to stay there and write a book. As I said, men who write in books by women are usually villainous, and Laura immediately feels the weight of her chains, doomed to become ‘the same old Aunt Lolly, so useful and obliging and negligible’. In despair, she cries out loud for help and a kitten bites her. She realises at once what it means (and why everyone in the village is so weird and always up so late): Great Mop is a witches’ village and, in accepting that bite, she’s sold her soul to the devil and she’s a witch too. Her first act of magic is both mischievous and to the point: she sours Titus’s milk.

  She dances at a witches’ sabbath, and tingles all over when her alluring dancing partner’s red hair brushes her face. Titus’s milk curdles, day after day. He can’t keep it fresh, no matter what he does. And who can write with sour milk in their tea? No one. Finally, he skedaddles, and Laura is free.

  Warner wrote the novel quite consciously as a feminist fable, inspired by the idea that sixteenth-century Scottish witches may have turned to magic as a release from their dull, proscribed lives. Her devil is somewhat romantic, ‘a kind of black knight, wandering about and succouring decayed gentlewomen’, and (pre-empting Lady Chatterley’s Lover) dressed like a gamekeeper. Laura thinks she must be ‘a witch by vocation’: why else would she have made all those herbal remedies and gone on all those country walks? Warner, who supplemented her income by selling home-made chestnut jam, rhubarb chutney and pickled nasturtium seeds, played up her affinity with her heroine, telling Virginia Woolf she knew so much about witches because she was one, and claiming that modern witches flew on vacuum cleaners instead of broomsticks.

  But Lolly Willowes is not just whimsy. It’s a cry for freedom, for ‘a life of one’s own’, as Laura says – three years before Woolf called for a room. Warner wrote it ten years into a relationship with a married man. She was sick of being the other woman, living in the interstices of other people’s lives, in a small London flat where she subsisted on black coffee, cigarettes, winkles and scrambled eggs. But after she’d written Lolly Willowes and rehearsed self-sufficiency, Warner decided to try it for real. She broke up her relationship. Later she spent forty years with the androgynous poet Valentine Ackland. Love saved and reinvigorated her, and although her daring novel Summer Will Show is more directly about her relationship with Ackland (its heroine goes to Paris to track down her unfaithful husband and ends up falling for his mistress instead), it is in Lolly Willowes that she expunges her fear of living half a life and explores how she might change.

  The tough message of Lolly Willowes is that women turn witch to show their ‘scorn of pretending life’s a safe business’. Laura comes to feel part of a community of angry, outsider women: ‘When I think of witches,’ she says, ‘I seem to see all over England, all over Europe, women living and growing old, as common as blackberries, and as unregarded . . . Nothing for them except subjugation and plaiting their hair . . . But they must be active.’ Yes we must. Laura’s clarion call echoes right down to Mira in The Women’s Room saying all the women she knows feel like outlaws. When I read Lolly Willowes I was struggling with a play about an Orthodox Jewish girl who starts doubting her religion and her relationship. I wrote draft after draft with happy endings that didn’t ring true. I was keener than any Jewish mother to marry off my heroine, keener than Mrs Bennet to marry off her daughters, keener than my mother had been to get me under the chupah. Laura gave me the guts to try a different tack. I sent my heroine up a tree to kiss a boy during an anti-road protest, and brought her down again to confront her family, to tell her fiancé the truth, and t
o end the play single, questioning and hopeful. At the opening night party, I felt just the same.

  I still love Lolly Willowes. It’s a joy to reread – so buoyantly funny, so unrepentantly weird and so lyrical. Acerbic, unprepossessing Laura helped me keep my feet on the ground instead of wanting to be swept off them. She helped me worry less about meeting The One. She helped me feel I was living, not waiting. But now, I wonder if it wasn’t a bit perverse to switch from ingenious, witty Flora, who ends up flying off with her dream man, to Laura, who ends up sleeping in a hedge. I didn’t want to sell my soul to the devil. I wanted to be happy.

  But where are the happy fictional spinsters?

  Miss Havisham lives the single life with a certain batty panache, but much as I see her point, I don’t want to rot in my wedding dress, with my wedding feast covered in mould, spiders and mice, my cake cobwebbed, adopting a daughter and raising her as a feminist avenger. I go back to Persuasion, an old favourite, and am shocked to find that Anne Elliot is only 27! As a child, I thought she was ancient and her happy ending nothing short of miraculous. But no. And while I still think she’s brilliant, she can’t be my spinster heroine, because I have the biggest crush on Captain Wentworth so I’m willing them to marry all the way through; as, of course, is she.