Jane Eyre

Orphaned and unloved, small and plain and poor, Jane Eyre grows up through the cruelty of her aunt's house and the cold charity of Lowood school into a young woman with nothing to her name but an unbreakable will. As a governess at Thornfield Hall she falls in love with her brooding, secretive master, Mr. Rochester — and on the morning of her wedding discovers the secret kept locked on the third storey, the discovery that drives her out onto the moors with nothing.

Told entirely in Jane's own voice, looking back on her life with a candour that scandalised its first readers, the novel turns the machinery of Gothic romance — the great dark house, the laugh in the night, the burning bed — to a wholly new purpose. Its real subject is conscience: a self that is offered comfort again and again at the price of its integrity, and refuses every time.

“I am no bird,” Jane tells the man who would cage her, “and no net ensnares me.” Her insistence on being met as an equal — whatever her looks, her purse, or her place — was radical in 1847 and remains the beating heart of the book. So too does the woman Brontë left in the attic, a figure later writers from Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar to Jean Rhys have refused to leave in the dark.

More than a century and a half on, Jane Eyre answers honestly to every way of reading it — love story, thriller, coming-of-age, feminist manifesto — and survives them all on the strength of one plain, unanswerable demand.