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.
Rochester tests Jane by feigning interest in another woman to needle her into confessions, which reads now as manipulation dressed as passion: "the least lovely romantic love interest ever," one reader says, and another asks, "Not much of a prize, is he?" His condescending pet names and his habit of disparaging former lovers to her do not help. Bertha Mason is kept upstairs and kept a symbol, her Creole background folded into the book's account of her madness. The back third belongs to St. John Rivers and his cold campaign to redirect Jane's life, the section where readers report stalling. Then a late turn resolves her circumstances at a stroke, luck arriving where the story should have earned something.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
