What’s a girl to do when she has to leave her home, move to a strange country, and marry a man she’s never met? What can any woman do when she finds herself miles away from everything she knows, hemmed in on all sides by intrigue and shackled to a man who may be old, ugly, diseased, a drooling imbecile or all four at once? If she’s a queen, she might just take a handsome lover!

In her delightful memoir How to Be a Heroine or, What I’ve Learned from Reading Too Much, playwright Samantha Ellis revisits the stories that shaped her development as a woman and a writer, paying homage to the those literary heroines who became her muses.