In Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, the Victorian reader was presented with a shocking manifestation of personality: a female lead character who was poor, homely in appearance, intelligent, and absolutely unwilling to bow to arbitrary authority. Where the heroines of Anne Brontë's novels bore their misery in silence, or kept their superior intellects to their private diaries, Charlotte's title character has a fully-formed ego in childhood and does not hesitate to assert her evaluations of the bad behavior around her, to her great cost in most cases. So pronounced is Brontë's individualism, in fact, that it could be called a softer mirror of the feminism of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, the individualism of Thomas Paine, and a precursor of the Hegelian individualism that was taking shape on the continent in the mind of Max Stirner, author of The Ego and His Own, the first fully-developed statement of egoistic individualism.
You can read my paper on this topic here:
https://www.academia.edu/38398106/Charlotte_Bronte_-_The_Ego_Triumphant
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