How is Rochester portrayed as a loving person in Jane Eyre?

Mr. Rochester's behavior throughout the entire novel is one that easily confuses readers. The question always stands "If he really loved Jane Eyre, then why did he keep such a big secret from her?"
One way a person could look at Mr. Rochester is by looking at his merciful nature. The people that he kept around him were people that he obviously adored, but chose not to create a connection due to his fear of rejection and possibly damaging them with his own issues. So therefore, when it came down to Mr. Rochester and love, he seemed to fall easily and hard towards those that have a sense of innocence about them.
Then, with Jane Eyre, he seems to instantly want to have her at his side, but know that he cannot have the best of both worlds with him being married to Bertha. Nevertheless, he was drawn to Jane and carried himself with a tender, but somewhat guarded nature that even put Jane in a state of confusion with her constantly asking the question "Is he mocking me or is he being serious?" Rochester, on the other hand, finds himself at odds with not just his own ability to love Jane in the way that he knows and wants to love Jane Eyre, but he also has to deal with reality.
"I have for the first time found what I can truly love-I have found you. You are my sympathy-my better self-my good angel-I am bound to you with a strong attachment..."
After years of keeping a distance to keep the true innocent, Rochester finds himself unable to keep his distance from Jane Eyre. He is drawn to her because he felt that she had exactly what he needed, but could not possibly tell Jane Eyre about his wife because then, the mask would be away. There would no longer be a sense of innocence to keep and all of his disdainful behavior would have been for nothing.


Mr. Rochester's love is problematic through much of the novel. For example, he shows love for his illegitimate daughter Adele by caring for her, giving her gifts, and hiring her a governess in the form of Jane Eyre, but he also dismisses the child as affected and not very intelligent. Therefore, his love for her is mixed with distaste.
Rochester's love for Jane is also mixed: in this case, it is tainted with selfishness and deception. He loves her, and he believes her strength of character and purity can save him and make him a happy man, but he doesn't love her enough to tell her the truth about his situation of being married to Bertha Mason. He shows what imperfect love he has by proposing marriage to her, such as when he states:

"My bride is here," he said, again drawing me to him, "because my equal is here, and my likeness. Jane, will you marry me?"

He tries to express to her how much he loves her, even though he is not being honest with her:

You— you strange, you almost unearthly thing!—I love as my own flesh. You—poor and obscure, and small and plain as you are—I entreat to accept me as a husband.

He is willing to trick her into bigamy, which is what marrying means while Bertha is still alive. While we do not doubt that Rochester loves Jane, he is ready to sacrifice her moral values, which he knows matter deeply to her, for his own happiness. At this point, his love is selfish.
It's not until the end of the novel, when he has become blind and mutilated from the fire that consumed Thornfield that he has been humbled enough to truly love Jane as an equal.
When they reunite, he speaks these loving words to her:

My living darling! These are certainly her limbs, and these her features; but I cannot be so blest, after all my misery. It is a dream; such dreams as I have had at night when I have clasped her once more to my heart, as I do now; and kissed her, as thus—and felt that she loved me, and trusted that she would not leave me.

Later, Jane testifies to the love they share as husband and wife, this time an unselfish love on both sides:

We talk, I believe, all day long: to talk to each other is but a more animated and an audible thinking. All my confidence is bestowed on him, all his confidence is devoted to me; we are precisely suited in character— perfect concord is the result.

Rochester has grown, through painful experience, into a man who can love Jane as she deserves.

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