Bettany Hughes's six best books

Bettany Hughes is an author, historian and chair of judges for the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction. Her new book is The Hemlock Cup.

One of her six best books, as told to the Scottish Sunday Express:

Jane Eyre
by Charlotte Brontë

How could this be missed off anyone’s list? It has everything – windswept romance, the horrors of prejudice, the terrible power of secrets. And the character of Jane is so finely drawn I almost expect to bump into her at airport terminals or our library.

Read about another book on the list.

Jane Eyre also made the Guardian's top 10 lists of "outsider books" and "romantic fiction;" it appears on Lorraine Kelly's six best books list, Esther Freud's top ten list of love stories, and Jessica Duchen's top ten list of literary Gypsies, and on John Mullan's lists of ten of the best weddings in literature, ten of the best locked rooms in literature, ten of the best pianos in literature, ten of the best breakfasts in literature, ten of the best smokes in fiction, and ten of the best cases of blindness in literature. It is one of Kate Kellaway's ten best love stories in fiction.

The Page 99 Test: Jane Eyre.

--Marshal Zeringue