Sentence No. 73 · 8 June 2026
I had not intended to love him; the reader knows I had wrought hard to extirpate from my soul the germs of love there detected.
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
Charlotte Brontë — Jane Eyre (1847) · Read it at Project Gutenberg
What holds this sentence together
The semicolon here divides a short confession from its longer explanation. When you see two unequal clauses joined by a semicolon, the briefer, bolder statement almost always comes first — use that asymmetry to anchor the opening phrase.
How it appears in Sentle
On Sentle this sentence arrives in 7 pieces, shuffled, with the lines that lead up to it for context. Jane reflects on feelings for Mr Rochester she has struggled to suppress. Putting it back in the author’s order is the puzzle — and the order is rarely arbitrary, which is what the note above is about.
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