If any of my lecturers had attempted the Brontes as chicklit line I would have told them they were lazy and sexist.
Jane Eyre is a ground-breaking feminist work of genius which changed the course of English literature. A progenitor of novels of 'interior consciousness' it bravely placed a plain, female servant in its central role.
The reason chicklit has similar plots is because the writers aren't original or talented enough to come up with a new story, so they copy the plots of great novels. That does not make Jane Eyre chicklit, any more it makes than 50 Shades of Meh a work of art. Romeo & Juliet is another much-copied narrative of 'star-crossed lovers' are people going to claim Shakespeare is chicklit too?
Jane Eyre does not follow a typical wish-fulfilment narrative: Jane has a traumatising early life first at her aunt's then at an awful school with a sadistic headmaster. She falls for he employer, he betrays her trust by attempting a bigamous marriage, she leaves and when she returns her employer been disfigured, partially blinded, and his house wrecked by a fire.
It's a strange, dark and bleak work, whose ending is only partially happy.
If Jane Eyre or rather Charlotte Bronte is the grandmother of anyone, it's of other great writers such as George Eliot, Henry James, Hardy, Woolf, Angela Carter, whose debt to her (and her sisters) is clear in their work.
The true grandmothers of chicklit are the sub-literature genre of lady novelists who churned out romantic pap for cash such as Florence L Barclay, Mrs Humphrey Ward, Marie Corelli, Ethel M Dell, most of whom have been forgotten chiefly because their books were crap.