Here’s why, according to writer and teacher Joanna Russ: “The myth of the isolated achievement so often promotes women writers’ less good work as their best work. For example, Jane Eyre exists, as of this writing, on the graduate reading list of the Department of English at the University of Washington. … Villette does not appear on the list. How could it? Jane Eyre is a love story and women ought to write love stories; Villette, ‘a book too subversive to be popular,’ is described by Kate Millett as ‘one long meditation on a prison break.'”