Six out of ten, and every one of those points belongs to Bertha.

Reader, the middle third defeated me. Not the Lowood chapters, which are ferocious and which I'd defend against anybody — the cold, the burnt porridge, Helen Burns dying quietly while the institution congratulates itself. That is as good as anything written in the century.

It's the Thornfield romance I cannot do. Rochester lies to her throughout the courtship, keeps a woman locked upstairs, stages a fake engagement in order to torment her, and the novel's settled position is that he requires a small maiming before he becomes eligible. I understand the case that his blinding levels them, that Jane can only return once she has money of her own and he has needs of his own. I understand it and the arithmetic still strikes me as grim.

Then St John arrives, apparently to make Rochester look good by comparison, and stays for what feels like a season. Every reader I've spoken to skims him. If a figure exists purely as the control condition in an experiment, cut him.

What keeps this at six rather than lower is the voice. That first-person insistence, in 1847, from a small poor plain woman who will not be talked out of her own valuation of herself, remains genuinely startling. Her passage about women needing exercise for their faculties as much as their brothers do still has current running through it.

Deborah says I only think any of this because I read Wide Sargasso Sea first, and that taking them in that order permanently rearranges the furniture. She's probably right. I'm not convinced it's a defect.