Best-selling author Samantha Ellis will be talking about and signing her new book How to Be a Heroine on Wednesday, March 12th, 5-6 pm in HUMSS G27, Whiteknights Campus.
Her book will be available for purchase (cash only) at a discount at the talk, but you are welcome to buy it elsewhere and bring it to the talk to be signed. However, you are not required to buy or even read the book. Instead you can get some idea at her talk how the study of literature can shape your life in ways that you did not anticipate and in fact can lead to a successful career as a creative writer.
To give you some idea of the book, the Guardian recently stated in a review that Samantha
‘looks back at the books that have influenced her ideas about sex, love and the female predicament during a not very long life (she is 37), and they are certainly a mixed bunch, including Lace, Riders, The Valley of the Dolls and The Little Mermaid as well as Forster, Woolf, Austen and the Brontës. Anne of Green Gables was a pivotal early read and showed her that one could be a misfit and still find a soulmate, that one could be a writer, too, like Jo March in Little Women, even though Jo is not rewarded with the lover she wants. Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Princess suggested ways of mending the rents in life with daydreams, and in the wake of a religious crisis Ellis took comfort from JD Salinger’s Franny Glass. Scarlett O’Hara fooled her into thinking that there was value and even glamour in unrequited love while Elizabeth Bennet promised the possibility of following one’s heart without losing one’s head.’
