'Where are the happy fictional spinsters?'

This book arose from an argument. Lifelong bookworm Samantha Ellis and her best friend had gone to Brontë country and were tramping about on the Yorkshire moors when they began bickering: would it be better to be Cathy Earnshaw, or Jane Eyre? Ellis had always been fervently in the Cathy camp, re-reading Wuthering Heights every year (often in the bath) and swooning. But now, in her thirties, came an epiphany. She’d chosen the wrong heroine. This was understandable, given the ‘high drama’ of her family background, in the small community of north London Jews exiled from Baghdad. As she puts it:

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 ten or fifteen times. So the Sturm und Drang of Heathcliff and Cathy’s love made sense to me.