I love this book so much I can barely write coherently about it. Hence, much love and little rational explanation. It's just one of the best books on books and reading ever.
Samantha
Ellis is a British playwright who as part of her own writing spends some time
thinking about how the literary heroines that she loved through her lifetime as
a reader have influenced her life and her writing.
From Anne Shirley to Scarlett O'Hara, Franny Glass and the Dolls of Valley of the Dolls, (oh, and Lucy Honeychurch!) this book is filled with so much love for reading and
with a deliciously full bibliography for each chapter.
I love her rethinking of
her youthful love for Wuthering Heights and her disdain for Jane Eyre, and especially
that she uses Gilbert and Gubar's feminist literary criticism classic The Madwoman in the Attic as a source. (I studied that up and down when writing my senior
paper on Jane Austen's Emma.) And I love her love for Cold Comfort Farm.
This is very meta, but bear with me. Ellis is writing about
Flora Poste in Cold Comfort Farm and quotes from the novel:
"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 around one, people cannot even begin to enjoy life. I cannot endure messes.'"Delicious!