After years of self-centered wandering, shielding my shattered spirit from further vain expectation, I now knew what it was to be loved.”

Yet….

“A cursed, damaged, aging wretch as I had no right to one so innocent, lovely, good and gifted as she…”

Edward Fairfax Rochester. He remains one of nineteenth-century English literature’s most enduring sex symbols, and, to this day, women the world over continue to swoon for him. Rochester is an imaginative exploration of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre as seen through the eyes of a fiercely sensuous and introspective leading man. His story is told with all the realism of a passionate, masculine heart in narrative enriched with keen observations of settings and fellow players. Through Edward’s words, we leave behind coincidence and politesse to wander through his evocative world and probe what otherwise might have happened from that compelling first meeting onward. We are given Edward’s life of pain and travel beside him to absolution through the unsullied form of a lonesome young governess.

Here, Rochester tells of their journey in his own uninhibited, saucy, conceited, funny, manly way and would never dream of fading to black when the bedchamber door shuts.

J. L. Niemann is a surgical Physician Assistant and former English major with no prior publications. A twenty-year preoccupation with Bronte’s Jane Eyre, an obsession with a certain film adaptation of the story, and a sudden, relentless desire to write led to Rochester’s creation. The author lives in Toledo, Ohio.