"Why does Jane Eyre retain its appeal after so many decades, and so many intervening novels of virginal young heroines, Byronic moody mysterious elder men, and melodramatic disclosures? One answer is, simply, the quality of Jane's and Rochester's characters. They are believable. They are intelligent, yet emotional, superior beings who are human, even flawed; as the nineteenth-century reader would have discerned, they are models for us all."

"Jane Eyre is the first fictional heroine to give women permission, as it were, to have an intense inner life."