In the middle of the 19th century, it was a shocking story, notes Anne Applebaum: “A woman left her fiance standing at the altar after an unexpected revelation, ran away without a penny, threw herself on the mercy of strangers — and then ultimately returned.” So what makes the story of Jane Eyre different from Duluth, Georgia’s runaway bride Jennifer Wilbanks? In her Washington Post column, Applebaum writes, “This is not the beginning of an apology for Wilbanks, whose motives seem significantly less exalted than those of Jane Eyre . . . . But where Jane Eyre merely defied her era’s conventional morality, it seems to me that the Wilbanks story also underlines some ambiguities in our conventional morality.”