Jane Eyre
Charlotte Bronte created the founding text of the feminist tradition in the English novel. Jane insists on her own moral dignity against every pressure, and her voice still sounds startlingly contemporary. Every subsequent novel about a woman's interiority has had to reckon with this template, published the same year as Wuthering Heights.
Brontë solves her plot with machinery a soap opera would blush at: Jane flees across England, collapses on a stranger's doorstep, and the coincidence waiting there is so tidy it might as well be gift-wrapped. Bertha Mason, the Creole woman the novel keeps at its margins, is a gothic prop, not a person; Jean Rhys wrote a whole novel to object. And Rochester's lying gets rewarded.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
