Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre grows up an unwanted orphan at Gateshead Hall, abused by her aunt and cousins, then sent to Lowood, a charity school run on cold and hunger, where she loses her closest friend to the fever that sweeps the place. As a young woman she takes a post as governess at Thornfield Hall, where her employer, the blunt, moody Edward Rochester, becomes first an intellectual equal and then the love of her life, meeting her as no one ever has, on the level rather than looking down. Their wedding is stopped at the altar by the revelation that Rochester already has a wife, Bertha Mason, kept hidden and mad in Thornfield's attic. Jane flees rather than become his mistress, nearly starves on the moors, and is taken in by the Rivers siblings, whose brother St John, a cold and dutiful clergyman, proposes marriage as a working partnership for missionary life in India rather than love. Jane refuses him, hears Rochester's voice calling her name across the distance in a moment the novel never fully explains, and returns to find Thornfield burned, Bertha dead, and Rochester blinded and maimed in the fire. She marries him at last as an equal, no longer dependent, and the novel closes on her own terms.

Bronte writes the whole book in Jane's first person voice, plain spoken, furious under the surface, and utterly clear about what she wants and refuses to accept less than. The famous line that opens its final chapter, "Reader, I married him," puts Jane, not Rochester, as the one who chooses.

It appeared first under the pseudonym Currer Bell, and contemporary readers argued fiercely over whether a woman could have written prose so direct and unfeminine.