Gems While Editing My Thesis

“He was the first to recognise me, and to love what he saw.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

This is one of the quotes from Jane Eyre that truly touches me. Like Jane, physical beauty is not something I possess and when someone starts to see and give interest in me and actually like me, it's one of the best feelings I could experience. And like me, Jane is someone who had until then been at the fringes of other people’s lives, a listener by default and has the lack of opportunity to be anything else, yet so, Rochester creates her, too, by seeing her as she really was when no one else did, and talking to her as no one else did, and above all, treating her as his equal.

‘Take care, Jane. Don’t look too closely inside of me. You might not find anything within at all beautiful.
…and then, where would we be?’

- Rochester to Jane Eyre

Rochester is funny – very funny – in that dry laconic way, and he’s quipping himself to hell while you curse him for being everything that he is, and then doing what he does – and not doing what he might have done.

'You know I…it’s like we’re a pair of Eshton’s twins – bound together in some unworldly way – sharing a spirit, we’re so alike. When we are parted – when you leave me – I believe that bond will snap. And I will bleed inwardly…you’ll forget me, after a while.’

- Rochester to Jane Eyre 

And in the end, she was the saving of him. Although in contemporary translatable terms, I think it might be largely irrelevant, as most people are, for lack of a better word, more straightforward than that, and their needs less complex, their souls less harrowed.

Okay. Back to my thesis.