Plain, poor, and passionate, Jane Eyre narrates her own life with a directness that shocked Victorian readers. The orphaned child, the cruel school, the strange house with its hidden secret, the man she loves and leaves and finds again: Charlotte Brontë wrote it in a matter of months while nursing her dying father. The narrative voice is intimate and defiant: Reader, I married him. The madwoman in the attic has become a feminist symbol, but the novel's power is in Jane herself, small and plain and refusing to be diminished. The moors burn with Gothic intensity. The voice never wavers.