Jane Eyre

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

Orphaned, plain, and raised on the cold charity of an aunt who never wanted her, Charlotte Bronte's fieriest heroine refuses, at every turn, to be grateful for less than she deserves. When she arrives at Thornfield Hall as governess after a grueling Lowood education , she meets Mr. Rochester - brooding, rich, magnificently rude and unpredictable - and finds herself, against all good sense, wanting more.

But Thornfield Hall has a secret. Bumps in the night. Curtains set ablaze. Injured guests. Bronte's 1847 gothic masterpiece essentially invented the modern self in literature. It is a novel about a young woman who insists on her own worth even when granted everything she could seemingly wish for.

When published under the pen name Currer Bell, one reviewer noted: "No woman in all the annals of feminine celebrity ever wrote such a style, terse yet eloquent, and filled with energy bordering sometimes almost on rudeness: no woman ever conceived such masculine characters as those portrayed here."

Reader, a woman did.