Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre is orphaned, shut in a locked red room by the aunt raising her, and sent off to Lowood, a charity school where the pupils are half starved and typhus does the rest. She comes out a governess, takes a post at Thornfield, and falls for its owner, Mr Rochester, who keeps something on the third storey. That is roughly the first two thirds. The last stretch is Jane on the moors with no money, begging bread at doors, then refusing a second man, St John Rivers, who wants a wife for a mission in India. She narrates it herself and turns to address you outright when she wants a point conceded. Eight and a half hours, much of it argued rather than dramatised.