Literary ladies: Come the X-chromosome How To Be a Heroine: Or, What I've Learned From Reading Too Much. By Samantha Ellis. Chatto & Windus; 264 pages; £16.99. WOULD you rather be Charlotte Brontë"s Jane Eyre or Emily's Cathy Earnshaw? This is the debate Samantha Ellis was having with a friend as they wandered over the wild Yorkshire moors to see the farmhouse that inspired "Wuthering Heights." Ms Ellis, a British author and playwright, had always identified with passionate and headstrong Cathy, but perhaps independent, brave Jane was the truer heroine. This thought prompted her to reread her favourite novels and reassess her heroines. The result is a delightful and hilarious memoir about the characters she loved as a prim girl with an overactive imagination (the hair of "The Little Mermaid" "curls like the waves she lives in") and the ones she has come to admire as an independent thirty-something (Jane Eyre's preternatural calm "now seems like enviable self-possession.") Ms Ellis grew up an Iraqi-Jew in London, so her appetite for reading was a quest for self-identity too. She sometimes misread the messages. "Gone With the Wind" made her crash diet so she could have a 17-inch waist like Scarlett O'Hara. More worryingly, "The Bell Jar" made her think womanhood was only about suffering. But there were good influences too. It was "Anne of Green Gables" who made Ms Ellis channel her imagination into becoming a writer, and "Marjorie Morningstar" who instilled within her a love of theatre. Franny Glass in J.D. Salinger's "Franny and Zooey" helped her "find meaning outside religion." She wishes she'd read Shirley Conran's "Lace" in her 20s. The 1980s British bonkbuster is a career-woman's handbook about four trail-blazing women who shun convenient marriages for big hair, leopard prints and gainful employment. There is a streak of feminism in Ms Ellis's soul-searching, but warm self-deprecation comes more naturally to her. In search of a happy spinster she finds Lily in Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse" and tells a male writer that the lighthouse is a beacon of her self-sufficiency. He, however, laughs and says it is a phallus, and a feminist friend claims it is a dildo. Heroines can rarely exist without heroes. Ms Ellis was brought up to find a sensible Jewish husband but still she swooned over princes, villains, cads and dreamboats. Rhett Butler still makes me flutter. People are often told not to meet their heroines. But Ms Ellis hails them as old friends, imagining them all at a raucous party in her flat. If there is a moral to the story, perhaps it is that you grow into your own heroines. Until then, have a ball trying on their clothes.