I initially started reading Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre more out of sense of English majory duty than anything else, honestly; I’d somehow completed a Masters in English Literature without ever once giving Jane Eyre a crack. Not that I wasn’t unaware of the oversight; I’d read and enjoyed Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights on my own, and had even read Villette by Charlotte for a class, a book that both Virginia Woolf and a friend from college said was even better than Jane Eyre. But somehow Jane Eyre itself had slipped past me. And when I one day casually mentioned this to a friend, a passing professor stopped, turned around, and dressed me down right then and there for daring neglect this foundational classic of English literature.

So now that I’d graduated and could finally read whatever I want…I still read stuff my professors demanded. C’est la vie.

Yet what was more interesting, is when I mentioned to a couple girls in my YSA ward at the time that I was finally reading Jane Eyre, they both began gushing in hushed, reverent tones how it was their favorite book and had changed their lives. In fact, it seems almost every LDS girl I met has read Jane Eyre. So, I figured it wouldn’t hurt me to read a book that other people actually read for once, especially one that the ladies seem to love so much; and since I will never read Twilight, Jane Eyre it was.

As I read, it swiftly became apparent why so many young women love Jane Eyre–the titular protagonist is passionate, outspoken, honest, intelligent, uncompromising, and emotionally strong. She’s not afraid to be alone, even when she clearly craves love and friendship. She would be a rare character in fiction even today. Jane Eyre often gets bandied about as proto-feminist–and maybe it was for the time, but I’m not sure the finale quite earns that designation; the purported “happy ending” involves young Jane telling the brooding object of her affections Mr. Rochester, who protests that she cannot possibly still want to marry him now that he is maimed and blinded, that nothing would fill her with so much joy as to wait upon and care for him the rest of her days. After this passionate woman who has been willing, since a child, to endure beatings, privations, starvation, destitution, betrayal, heartbreak, extreme loneliness, despair, even daring damnation itself, all to never compromise her integrity and principles, I’m still not quite sure what to do with her considering this life of complete domesticity and romantic servitude her highest fulfillment.

Yet as one girl (from Idaho, significantly) explained to me: the difference isn’t that she marries, but rather that she marries a man who always treats her as an equal. She said the book changed her life because it convinced her that she needn’t settle for marrying into an inherently subjugated role, but that she could be as stubborn and uncompromising as Jane in insisting that her future husband treat her as an equal as well. I’m still trying to decide about that one, because Rochester is enthralled with her a in a way that pedestalizes and therefore subjugates her. But at the same time, Jane and Rochester banter in an easy way that suggests each considers the other a worthy conversational adversary.

Yet I also can’t help but note how much this novel couldn’t be written today: divorce laws today would allow one to annul a marriage to a lunatic wife from an arranged marriage who keeps trying to burn down your house, thus freeing one to marry one’s true love; and though the Protestant ethic continues to haunt us Anglo-Americans today like a curse, the sort of austere Calvinist preacher personified in Rivers St. John thankfully doesn’t exist today, nor would he be able to exert such fantastic pressure on a woman to marry him if he did. By every measure, this book should be a historical artifact, a relic from a strange and alien time.

Yet based on the responses I got from my YSA sisters, it remains distressingly relevant today. I said earlier it’s significant that this girl who fell in love with Jane Eyre was from Idaho. Having gone to college in the gem state, I can tell you right now that her anxieties for her future were not unfounded, that numerous young women there are still married off as underage teenagers to much older men. It is still the worst parts of Victorian England up there in those frozen wastes. A joke someone told me is that Idaho is an acronym for “I Didn’t Ask How Old”–and though none-Idahoans everywhere are rightfully disgusted with that joke, every young Idahoan woman I’ve repeated it to has roared with laughter. Why? Because these too-young marriages wherein minors are arranged into life-long dependents with much older men is still distressingly the norm up there (jokes are sometimes the most serious statements we can make, after all). In a place like southeast Idaho, in the shadow of BYU-I and multiple temples, the ethos of Jane Eyre is still positively radical and liberational.

At the risk of being didactic, it shouldn’t be this way–not in Idaho, not anywhere. We should just be appreciating Jane Eyre as a good story well-told, not as a deeply resonant indictment against the structural sexism and misogyny of our present society. Yet is is, and that is to our condemnation.

In fact, the more I think about Jane Eyre, especially in this era of passive Bellas, gossip girls, and Real Housewives, women who can only be valued for their skills in sexual seduction, the more I wish we had more literary heroines like Jane. Three waves of feminism lie between us and Bronte, yet still Jane Eyre feels like a new woman, even a little dangerous (in a good way), like a mad-woman breaking out of the attic to burn down a house that should’ve been burned down a long time ago.