7 The Professor (written 1846; published 1857) by Charlotte Brontë

This was the first novel that Charlotte Brontë completed. It was rejected by publishers nine times. Written in the voice of a male narrator, William Crimsworth, it offers a downbeat story of everyday middle-class striving as the protagonist travels to Brussels to establish his career as a teacher. But the last publisher to see it thought it showed promise, despite being too short and insufficiently “striking and exciting”. Had the author anything else to offer? Luckily, Jane Eyre – which amply supplied the earlier book’s deficiencies – was already in train and was soon accepted with alacrity. Although The Professor remained unpublished in Charlotte’s lifetime, she continued to believe that it was “as good as I can write”; its subtly ironised male voice reveals her underlying literary sophistication.

6 Agnes Grey (1847) by Anne Brontë

In 1846, the three Brontë sisters had – at their own expense – published a joint poetry collection under the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. It sold just two copies. Realising that fiction was more saleable, they decided that each should write a novel under the same pen names. While Charlotte toiled over The Professor, the youngest sister, Anne, was working on Agnes Grey. It also sought to portray everyday life, but the result has a more authentic ring since she drew so directly on her personal experience working as a governess in well-to-do families. The first-person heroine is initially excited at the thought of earning her own living. But she finds herself underpaid and unappreciated by the snooty parents, while her tantrum-prone charges include a vile little boy who likes pulling the legs off baby sparrows. Had it not been overshadowed by Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights when it came out in 1847, it might perhaps have caused more of a stir as a Nanny Diaries-style exposé.

5 Shirley (1849) by Charlotte Brontë

This flawed follow-up to Jane Eyre was written under trying circumstances. Charlotte’s brother Branwell and both her sisters sickened and died in quick succession during the writing of it, so it was abandoned for a while before being resumed by the bereaved author. That’s not, however, the only reason why this “condition of England” novel – which announces itself on page one as “something unromantic as Monday morning” – has failed to entrance readers as much as its predecessor Jane Eyre. Its third-person narrative does not focus on a single hero or heroine and as a result the book feels comparatively diffuse, though Charlotte herself might have defended it on the grounds that real life is diffuse. Set during the Luddite riots of 1811-12, it explores social unrest, capitalism and the “woman question”. Because of her proto-feminism, Charlotte’s ideological position has often been called progressive, yet she was in fact a political conservative.

4 The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë (1848)

In feminist terms, Anne’s second novel is the most radical and socially engaged of all the sisters’ books. The eponymous tenant, Helen Huntingdon, is hiding out at Wildfell Hall with her young son after leaving her abusive husband. At the time, unequal marriage laws meant that it was very hard for a woman to get a divorce at all and nigh impossible for her to get custody of her children. In Jane Eyre, Charlotte had made Mr Rochester a sexy Byronic rake; Anne, in reply, exposed the toxic masculinity behind that character type. Despite the novel’s strong Christian message, its unvarnished portrayal of addiction and adultery shocked Victorian readers more than any of the other Brontë books. More interested in the real than the ideal, Anne was drawing on her experience as a witness to Branwell’s chaotic behaviour.

3 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1847)

The first of the Brontë novels to be published, Charlotte’s melodramatic tale of the poor plain governess and the madwoman in the attic became a bestseller on first publication. Its genius, in fact, lies less in the plot than in what George Eliot’s future partner GH Lewes, who was one of its first reviewers, called its “strange power of subjective representation”. Ditching the distancing device of a male narrator for a female voice proved Charlotte’s creative breakthrough: it enabled her to inject a then unprecedented first-person intensity into the novel form. However, Jane Eyre proved controversial at the time among sexist critics. Correctly surmising that the author behind “Currer Bell” was a woman, they decried the book as “coarse” and the heroine as too assertive for a female.

2 Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847)

It is mind-boggling to think that Wuthering Heights was written alongside The Professor and Agnes Grey, quite literally on the same dining room table in Haworth Parsonage at which all three sisters sat together working on their first novels. Emily’s masterpiece was called “a strange book baffling all regular criticism” on publication; it remains enigmatic, completely sui-generis and totally outside the norms of Victorian fiction. Justly regarded as one of the greatest works in the western canon, it’s far from the cliched love story it later became in popular culture. Though grisly with violence, it’s oddly devoid of sex. The writing is astonishing: scarcely any adjectives and not a purple passage in sight. The Victorian poet Swinburne was right to compare it to Greek tragedy.

1 Villette by Charlotte Brontë (1853)

Less famous than Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights, Villette is Charlotte Brontë’s masterpiece and deserves to be better known. Here, she goes back to the Brussels material that she had already used at a tangent in The Professor – and which was rooted in her real-life experience of studying and teaching there in 1842-4. Reworking those memories from a first-person female perspective, she now incorporated her own secret into the story: the unrequited love she had felt for her Belgian writing tutor Constantin Heger. Yet the result is anything but naïve autobiography. Instead, it shows Charlotte push the classic realist Victorian novel in new, artistically experimental directions. The unreliable narrator, Lucy Snowe, has intimacy issues and sets a challenge for the reader. Long before Freud, Charlotte was exploring questions about repression and the unconscious in a complex, self-knowing psychological novel whose generic status hovers ambiguously between naturalism, gothic and autofiction. The extent to which Villette mined and refracted her own inner life was only discovered posthumously by her biographers.

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