Jane Eyre — Charlotte Bronte (1847)

Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre — the first-person narrative of an orphaned governess who refuses to accept social diminishment while also refusing to compromise her moral principles — is the novel that invented the modern literary heroine. "Reader, I married him" remains the most famous sentence in romantic fiction, but it is Jane's insistence on her own dignity, desire, and autonomy throughout the novel that makes her one of fiction's most powerful protagonists.