Jane Eyre
The orphan, the governess, the locked room at Thornfield, and the chestnut tree split in half the night after the proposal.
Jane Eyre is orphaned, sent to a charity school, and becomes governess at Thornfield to the ward of a man with something locked upstairs. Charlotte Brontë published it in 1847 under the name Currer Bell, and its insistence that a plain, poor woman has a self worth defending was what made it startling.
Recommended by 1 Person
Tracy Chevalier
Rochester proposes to Jane there, and then the next night it’s split in half by lightning. It’s a heavy-handed symbol but it’s still incredibly satisfying. It’s not even that the tree is struck down and killed, it’s split in half. The idea of marriage is that two people are going to become one, but here you know—because of the mad woman in the attic—that it’s one thing about to be split in two.
Interview · March 2016
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