And Jane is so bold! She is clever, and not afraid to show it. She sticks to her guns. She gets what she wants. And it’s hard not to love her when she asks Rochester, “Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong!” Or when she insists she is talking to him “as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God's feet, equal – as we are!” It’s a stark contrast to Cathy’s declaration “I am Heathcliff!” which makes love sound like a rather terrifying merging, a loss of self. And yet (and I confess that for a long time, Cathy was the only heroine for me) love sometimes feels that way.

‘Hunger, rebellion and rage’

One reason the Brontë heroines have stood the test of time is because they are such fun to argue about. They can’t be pinned down. They are dazzlingly complex. They are messy, flawed and difficult and all the better for it. When Charlotte tried to simplify things in Shirley, giving all the passion to one heroine and all the denial to another, she drained the life out of both. And neither Shirley nor Caroline inspires the same devotion as Jane or Cathy.

In Villette, Charlotte went back to what she did best, creating a heroine, Lucy Snowe, whose lust and fury are perpetually at war with her vehement attempts to be cool, unruffled. “I, Lucy Snowe, was calm” she says and we know she is lying through her teeth, and it is that conflict that makes us keep on reading. This was the novel that made Matthew Arnold say Charlotte’s mind contained nothing but “hunger, rebellion and rage”.

Lucy hasn’t been as popular as Jane, perhaps because she is so incredibly prickly, so deeply unlikeable; an unreliable narrator who locks the reader out, a heroine who refuses to be a heroine. But I wonder if her time is coming. There has been a backlash against likeable heroines. From Claire Messud’s sour female artist in The Woman Upstairs, to Gillian Flynn’s psychopathic Amy in Gone Girl, to the man-stealing Jenn in Helen Walsh’s The Lemon Grove, novelists have been championing mean girls, villainesses and anti-heroines. Perhaps Lucy might yet eclipse Jane.