'What Elizabeth Bennet taught me about romance'

Lizzy Bennet, the tart, defiant heroine of Pride And Prejudice, might seem an unlikely guide to romance for an awkward, chubby 12-year-old, growing up in the London suburbs in the 1980s. But while at school I was rolling up the waistband of my skirt to make it shorter, and improvising plays about suff ragette Emily Wilding Davison throwing herself under the king’s horse (I played the horse), at home it was a different story.

In my close-knit, traditional Iraqi Jewish community, the pressure was on for me to marry a Nice Iraqi Jewish Boy. So while my friends were learning about love from Judy Blume and (daringly) Jilly Cooper, Jane Austen felt more relevant to my life.

Like me, the five Bennet sisters had to get married, and soon. I found Jane too sweet, Mary too priggish, Kitty too airheaded, Lydia too flirtatious, but I loved Lizzy. She gave me hope. Because not only does she turn down two (two!) marriage proposals, she also manages to find a man her parents like as much as she does – and Mr and Mrs Bennet don’t agree on anything.

Mr Darcy was my ideal man, too. What captured my heart was his candour. I’d started to think that being a woman was about deceit – you straightened your curls, you wore clothes that made you look thinner, you defined your cheekbones with blusher, you never, ever told a boy you liked him, you played games. But my friends and I also wanted to be true to ourselves, not like the girls we called ‘plastics’, who fake-laughed and talked behind our backs and wore eyeliner to school. So when Mr Darcy told Lizzy: ‘We neither of us perform to strangers’, I underlined it so hard the pen went through the page. I longed for honesty, for someone who understood the real me.

Because I didn’t know yet who the real me was, I wanted someone who could help me find out, just like Mr Darcy shows Lizzy she’s been prejudiced, and she helps him confront his pride. Even better, Mr Darcy says his ideal woman must have done ‘extensive reading’. So real men did like bookish girls!

But there were perils to loving Mr Darcy. I wish I could tell my 12-year-old self that not all arrogant men are secretly lovely; some are just arrogant. When I got rejected by the arrogant boy I fancied, Lizzy was there for me. She copes with being dumped by Mr Wickham by seeking out fresh air and big landscapes, asking ‘What are young men to rocks and mountains?’ (What indeed?) And she uses her wit as a survival strategy, to laugh herself out of disappointment.

But in my teens, I started feeling like a battle was coming, and laughter would never win it. Lizzy wins the game of Regency society, and gets a desirable man on her terms. But maybe I didn’t want to win my community’s game, or even to play it. Maybe I didn’t want to marry a man my family liked. Maybe, instead, I wanted someone like Heathcliff. Cathy Earnshaw, the passionate, headstrong heroine of Wuthering Heights, became my lodestar, and made me think the best kind of love was tempestuous, savage and wild.


A couple of summers ago, an argument with my best friend made me wonder if this was wise. I decided to go back and reread my favourite books, to revisit the fictional women who had shaped me. My new book, How To Be A Heroine, tells the story of meeting my heroines again. I realised that while Scarlett O’Hara gave me fantastic tips on flirting, she made me think unrequited love was transformative. It isn’t; it’s boring. Anne Shirley of Anne Of Green Gables taught me how to write love letters (never use a scratchy pen), but she and her husband later become what Bridget Jones would call ‘smug marrieds’. And I was sad to find that the women in Valley Of The Dolls keep their men by lying, stealing from other women, and fighting the ageing process tooth and claw.

When I went back to Pride And Prejudice, I found Lizzy as funny as ever, and just as strong (is there a better proto-feminist line than ‘Do not consider me now as an elegant female, but as a rational creature speaking the truth from her heart’?) I loved the scene where she arrives at Netherfield, flushed, with muddy petticoats and blown-about hair, and Mr Darcy thinks she looks much better than when she was pristine in her ballgown. And I wouldn’t ever want to be without Colin Firth emerging from that lake in the BBC adaptation, but it’s worth noting that this very sexy scene is actually in the book.

Reading it now, in my 30s, and (happily) single, Pride And Prejudice feels very unromantic. Now I can see the terror of destitution that makes Mrs Bennet hustle her daughters into matrimony. I can see how her parents’ unwise marriage makes Lizzy wary of romance. I can see how she comes to admire her friend Charlotte’s ruthless practicality, but can’t ever emulate it. And I can see how Jane is so reserved and diffident that she almost ends up alone; much better to be forthright like Lizzy. As for her laughter, I realise, halfway through the book, with a jolt, that at 12 I was more like Mr Darcy than like any of the Bennet sisters. Achingly earnest, I needed Lizzy to teach me what she teaches him – ‘to learn to be laughed at’. And maybe that, more than anything about romance, is what Lizzy Bennet has taught me.

How To Be A Heroine by Samantha Ellis (Chatto & Windus, £16.99).