Jane Eyre

Orphaned, unloved, and hardened by the brutal charity school at Lowood, Jane Eyre arrives at Thornfield Hall expecting nothing more than a quiet post as governess. Instead she finds Mr. Rochester — magnetic, secretive, and hiding something in the locked rooms upstairs that will threaten everything she's fought to become. Charlotte Brontë's 1847 masterpiece gave the world one of literature's fiercest, most morally uncompromising heroines: a woman who chooses her own conscience over love, security, or convention, decades before anyone else's heroine dared to. This is the classic that started the conversation.