That said -- Robert McCrum, you're aces, but some of this was painful.
(That is one terrible engraving of Charlotte, too, altho not bad as what Austen gets stuck with.)
From its haunting first line to its famous closer, "Reader, I married him", -- Not the last line.
Add to this a prose style of unvarnished simplicity whaa? No.
she also craves submission to her "master", the Byronic Mr Rochester ....OK this is arguable, but with that ending?
Within a very few pages of the opening, there are references to Paradise Lost, Walter Scott's Marmion and Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels The 'Marmion' reference is much later (and vexes literary critics because of how it dates -- or doesn't date -- the novel).
Brontë herself, the daughter of a tyrannical north country parson SIGH.
And JE is only 12th because it's in chronological order (Pilgrim's Progress is FIRST? arrrrgh allegory not a novel &c &c &c) but still -- pretty neat to see!