Jane Eyre
Charlotte Brontë · 1847
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.
The case against
Brontë solves her plot with machinery a soap opera would blush at: Jane flees across England and collapses on the doorstep of her only living cousins, who come with an inheritance attached. Bertha Mason, the Creole wife locked in the attic, is a gothic prop, not a person; Jean Rhys wrote a whole novel to object. And Rochester's lying gets rewarded.
Literary Fiction · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
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