“I was brought up on high drama,” Samantha Ellis writes. “An Iraqi Jewish endearment, fudwa, means ‘I would die for you’. In a five-minute phone call about yoghurt my grandma can offer to die for me 10 or 15 times. So the Sturm und Drang of Heathcliff and Cathy’s love made sense to me.”Wuthering Heights is one of the novels that gave Ellis the courage to become a writer instead of the contented wife and mother her community – Jews exiled from Baghdad to London – expected her to be. In How To Be a Heroine, Ellis rereads that and other cherished books to see whether she had been wrong to enshrine Cathy – and Scarlett, and Franny, Anne and Lucy, among others – as her patron saints of passionate, purposeful living.Ellis is a pl