On a pilgrimage to 'Wuthering Heights' with her best friend, Samantha Ellis found herself arguing about which heroine she liked best: Jane Eyre or Cathy Earnshaw. She was all for wild, free, passionate Cathy, but her friend found Cathy silly, a snob who betrays Heathcliff for Edgar and makes them all unhappy - while Jane makes her own way. And that's when she realised that all her life she'd been trying to be Cathy when she should have been trying to be Jane. So she decided to look again - and harder - at all the heroines she'd loved through her life, from her earliest obsessions with the Little Mermaid and Anne of Green Gables; and then on to Scarlett O'Hara, Sylvia Plath, the Dolls (of the Valley); and later Riders, Buffy, Flora Poste from 'Cold Comfort Farm' and many, many more.