If the science of the past 100 years has taught you anything it is that all possible worlds exist. The universe in which I sit here writing these words is only one of a countless number. If you can conceive of the possibility it must exist somewhere. There are possible worlds where I am not writing but sleeping (both dreaming or not), where I am talking (both truthfully and lying). There is a possible world where right now I am eating human flesh.

Now consider the consequences of this when applied to fiction. If every possible world exists, does every possible “Jane Eyre”? If you can conceive of it, it must exist. In fact, “Jane Eyre” is only gripping if you believe in the possibility of the worlds in which Jane and Rochester do not get together in the end. If you believe that the story of their reunion, reconcilement and eventual marriage is inevitable and immutable then the story bellows a dull and lifeless puppet show.

(Some of you readers may believe that that “Jane Eyre” is precisely that. I will allow you your tastes).

There are countless different “Jane Eyres” out in the fictional multiverse: I have read thousands upon thousands of them and yet I have not touched the tip of the different possibilities in existence. It would make your head spin. Jane marries St John Rivers. She marries him and dies on first reaching India. She marries him and flees back to England from India after seeing Rochester burning alive in a dream. She meets neither St. John nor Rochester but remains a teacher at Lowood until she dies of cholera at the age of 33 (this is a rather dull one).

There is even, in one of the worlds I have visited, a “Jane Eyre” which is really nothing more than an extremely graphic (and rather over-long) pornographic novel based on Jane (then an ‘under-teacher’) and Miss Temple’s secret Sapphic trysts in the latter’s study after their charges have been sent to bed.

There is, tragically, one “Jane Eyre” where Jane, the character, becomes self-aware. Over the course of the novel, she becomes conscious of her status as merely one facet of one aspect of an imaginary character in an inconceivably limitless fictional infinity.

In this world Jane’s famous line is not “Reader, I married him,” but instead, “Reader, are you there? Where are you? Can you truly see me? Are you reading me right now? Reader?”

Of course there are also versions of “Jane Eyre” where her parents do not die and she is not sent as an orphan to be brought up by her Aunt Reed. These novels are almost unrecognisable from the one that you know. Of course Jane is not alone in being a character totally influenced by the early death of her parents. Consider how many children’s stories you know start with the death of parents. Harry Potter also grows up to be a very different boy in the worlds in which his parents survive Voldemort’s attack.

Another children’s story that begins, in your world, with the death of parents is “James and the Giant Peach” (and if you think that some of the fictional universes I postulate are unlikely then stop to consider for a moment how unlikely the version of the story that you know in your universe is: a story that starts with James’ parents being “eaten up by an enormous angry rhinoceros which had escaped from London Zoo”).

In your world James is given a bag full of magic by a mysterious man he meets in the garden (you do remember him surely? Squeaky voice – sign saying ‘deus ex machina’ on his back). He gives James the bag, telling him to mix the magic crystals into a concoction with his own hairs and drink the resulting brew. Of course in your world he trips and drops the bag by the peach tree before he can do so. You may well have been satisfied as children reading the resulting tale of mutant fruit and giant insects, but you are missing out on the extraordinary stories in the universes where he doesn’t drop the bag. Most of the tales of maltreated and abused little boys who suddenly have limitless power and magic at their fingertips are strange, dark and frightening ones.

I suppose that the tragedy for you is that you will only ever read one story, you only ever see one side of the sculpture and therefore can be tricked into believing that it is in fact a painting.

Maybe this is why your “Hamlet” is the classic of your particular literary canon: your Danish Prince, more than any other I have seen, finds himself eternally torn between two worlds and two stories: the one in which he takes his revenge and the one in which he doesn’t.

If I have any advice for you it is this: cultivate an awareness of all the possible different threads lurking between the words, behind the pages. You need to stay on your toes if you are to be a reader.