heroine

In this year's John Lewis advert, the heroine, Sally, is seen frantically doing last-minute shopping for her sister.

“So here I am, starring in a movie where I’m literally playing a heroine with one of the biggest directors — Black or white — of our generation,” she writes.

Farrow talks about her acting career as though she were recalling a Charlotte Bronte novel about an insecure heroine surviving a series of dangerous scrapes and nefarious characters.

“I feel like the women in her work were always messy and more complex and they were quite flawed or as buttoned up as the rom-com heroines of Hollywood’s golden age,” Kaplan says.

By and large, the stories tend to feature a heroine fleeing the city to take refuge in conservative, if not expressly partisan, predominantly white small towns.