How To Be A Heroine by Samantha Ellis

Author:Samantha Ellis [Samantha Ellis]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2013-10-30T04:00:00+00:00

7

LUCY HONEYCHURCH

IT’S EMBARRASSING TO admit how wildly I misread A Room with a View when I was 20. Though I’m beginning to think all readings are provisional, and that maybe we read heroines for what we need from them at the time. And what I needed from Lucy Honeychurch then was an idea about becoming an artist and living an artist’s life. It was because of her that I started writing plays.

First, she took me to Florence. In E.M. Forster’s 1908 novel, Italy opens Lucy’s heart, shakes up her assumptions and changes her life. So, channelling Helena Bonham-Carter in the luscious Merchant Ivory film, I cultivated bird’s-nest hair and set off for a month in Florence, just before my final year. I was there to learn Italian, but the classes at the fusty stuccoed British Institute were just in the mornings. The sun-drenched afternoons and the cool, lazy evenings were for awestruck wandering, gazing at frescoes and eating gelato. I tried to give myself up to beauty, as Forster advises. He sends Lucy to Santa Croce without her Baedeker guide, and at first she’s frustrated by not knowing which tomb is the most beautiful, which most praised by Ruskin. The church feels enormous, and cold. (It is.) Then suddenly ‘the pernicious charm of Italy worked on her, and, instead of acquiring information, she began to be happy’.

Lucy’s big moment comes when she strays, unchaperoned, into the Piazza della Signoria. There’s a fountain, there’s the Loggia, it’s twilight, but she wants more. Just as she’s complaining, ‘Nothing ever happens to me’, something does. Two Italian men quarrel and one stabs the other. As the blood spurts, she swoons. Straight into the arms of George Emerson. Confused, questing George Emerson, who is staying at the same pensione as Lucy and her spinster cousin Charlotte Bartlett. After much tomfoolery and turmoil, Lucy and George finish the novel back in Florence – on their honeymoon.

My Florentine landlady thought I’d found my own George. She thought he was sneaking nightly into my tiny room. In fact she knew he was. The crystals had told her. She was a clairvoyant. Every afternoon, she’d drape shawls over the lamps, sheets over the mirrors (which spooked me – it’s what Jews do in a house of mourning) and sweep the crumbs off the kitchen table to accommodate a Ouija board and a jagged stack of crystals. I’d come in to find her weeping with her clients as she called up their dead, her mascara running in inky streaks – another reason to prefer churches full of frescoes to her flat. And the crystals were wrong: I didn’t have a man in my room. I had a script: the first play I’d written by myself. It was a Generation X melodrama, heavily influenced by Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? which was then my favourite play (obviously I wanted to be Martha, wanton, manic, wistful, and for Elizabeth Taylor to play me in the film). My play involved self-harm, bad puns, Barbie dolls, and in the second act we made Angel Delight live on stage.

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