Chapter 27 — the long night; Jane refuses to stay

Jane locks herself in her room and does not come out for hours. She lies on her bed in her wedding-day dress, dry-eyed, working it through. By the early afternoon she has decided. She rises, changes into her plain dress, packs her travelling bag, and faces the question of how to leave the house without being stopped. Rochester knocks at her door for hours. Eventually she opens it.

He tells her the whole story over the long afternoon. He had been a younger son, sent to Jamaica at twenty-three to marry a Creole heiress whose family wanted his name; the family had concealed her hereditary madness. He married her without knowing. Within four years she had become violent; divorce was legally impossible. He brought her back to England and installed her on the third floor under Grace Poole. He spent the next fifteen years wandering Europe — mistresses in three cities, none loved. Jane was the first person, he says, with whom he had felt the chance of a real life. He begs her to leave with him. They will go to a villa he owns in the south of France. They will live as husband and wife in everything but law.

Jane loves him. She also refuses. She tells him plainly that she will not be his mistress, that the legal status is not the issue — the issue is that to consent to such a life would be to consent to her own erasure. "I care for myself," she says. "The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself." He pleads; he reasons; he eventually exhausts himself in his arm-chair and falls asleep. She stands at his door for a long minute. She kisses him on the forehead. She goes downstairs in the dawn and out the side door with twenty shillings in her purse, and is gone before Mrs. Fairfax knows she has left.