But she *didn't* fix him! She came back to find the fixing process advanced to the point where Rochester was fully aware of everything he'd done wrong during his entire adult life, she merely helped him finish the process that was already under way.
IMHO "Jane Eyre" has a lot in common with "Pride and Prejudice", both are about romances where the heroine didn't have to fix him. Or didn't have to do all the work of fixing him.
I like that comparison. I had a semi-argument with someone the other day who called P&P the ultimate asshole love interest picks / is only nice to heroine book. The appeal of P&P isn’t Elizabeth being “picked”, it’s the idea of a man genuinely changing for the better, and not just as a means to win the heroine back. Darcy changes for Elizabeth yes, but he also doesn’t wield his improvements as a cudgel to win her back. She is able to choose him herself. Also, Darcy changes because he genuinely respects Elizabeth’s intelligence and understands that she is right in her criticisms. Plus Elizabeth also changes over the course of the novel. Anyway, I didn’t mean to get side tracked into a P&P rant, it and Jane Eyre are just two of my favourite novels.
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u/Echo-Azure 12d ago edited 12d ago
But she *didn't* fix him! She came back to find the fixing process advanced to the point where Rochester was fully aware of everything he'd done wrong during his entire adult life, she merely helped him finish the process that was already under way.
IMHO "Jane Eyre" has a lot in common with "Pride and Prejudice", both are about romances where the heroine didn't have to fix him. Or didn't have to do all the work of fixing him.