Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1847)

There is a laugh in the upper corridor of Thornfield Hall that no one will explain, and a governess who refuses to stop asking. Jane is plain, poor, and orphaned, raised on cruelty and told her whole life that she is nobody, and she narrates her own story as if daring you to look away. She falls in love with Rochester, her brooding master, and he with her, until the morning their wedding shatters on the secret he keeps locked upstairs: a wife, mad, kept like an animal in the attic. Jane could stay as his mistress and be adored. Instead she walks out into the rain with nothing, because the one thing she will not surrender is the self that says _I am no bird; and no net ensnares me_. Brontë wrote a love story whose deepest passion is a woman refusing to be possessed, and the fire of that refusal has never gone out.