Extract

I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will.

A small, plain, penniless orphan locked in a red room by her aunt hears her own scream and discovers that she possesses a voice the world will have to reckon with. Charlotte Bront's 1847 novel follows Jane from that childhood prison through the cold charity of Lowood School to Thornfield Hall, where she falls in love with its brooding master and where a secret locked on the third floor threatens everything. The prose burns with a fierce emotional honesty new to English fiction: Jane addresses the reader as an equal and demands to be recognized not for beauty or wealth but for the fire of her interior life. Bront gave literature a heroine who refuses pity and insists that a woman's soul is her own sovereign territory.