Mr. Rochester is the sort of man you’d notice before you decide whether you like him. He’s blunt, a little dark around the edges, and has the habit of testing people the way some folks test a door—pressing to see what gives. Money and travel have given him polish, but not peace. He wears his wit like armor and prowls through Thornfield as if the house belongs to his moods as much as to him.
What makes him compelling isn’t the storminess; it’s the flashes of gentleness that break through it. He listens when someone speaks with real feeling. He respects intelligence—especially when it talks back. With Jane, he drops the performance more than he means to, teasing like a man who hasn’t had a genuine conversation in years and is startled to find he wants another.
He is a Byronic hero, yes—proud, passionate, a little self-mocking—but he’s also very human: someone who’s made choices he can’t entirely defend, and who suspects that honesty might be the only path out of the maze he built. Meet him on the right evening and he can be almost boyish; meet him on the wrong one and you’ll think him unforgivable. The truth of him lives in the space between.
Come! we’ll talk over the voyage and the parting quietly half-an-hour or so, while the stars enter into their shining life up in heaven yonder: here is the chestnut tree: here is the bench at its old roots. Come, we will sit there in peace to-night, though we should never more be destined to sit there together.
fromJane EyrebyEvery atom of your flesh is as dear to me as my own: in pain and sickness it would still be dear. Your mind is my treasure, and if it were broken, it would be my treasure still; … whatever your faults, they were not invented: I would not have a part of you altered, any more than I would have a single feature changed in my face.
fromJane EyrebyI ask you to pass through life at my side—to be my second self, and best earthly companion.
fromJane Eyreby