Edward Rochester

Edward Rochester is the master of Thornfield Hall and the principal love interest of the title character in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. Wealthy, moody and secretive, he hires Jane as governess for his young ward and gradually falls in love with her intelligence and independence, proposing marriage despite the difference in their stations. Their wedding is interrupted by the revelation that Rochester is already married to Bertha Mason, a woman he wed years earlier in Jamaica and has since kept confined in Thornfield's attic after she became violently mentally ill. After Jane leaves him, Bertha sets fire to Thornfield, killing herself and leaving Rochester blinded and maimed; he and Jane are ultimately reunited and marry once he is a widower. Rochester is a defining example of the Byronic hero in English fiction, a passionate, morally compromised figure whose past secrets nearly destroy the woman he loves.