LAUSR

ABSTRACT Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) contains a rather uncommon phrase: ‘to unlove,’ meaning ceasing to love. Getting back one’s heart played a crucial, but often overlooked role in representations and negotiations of love. This article considers literary descriptions and meanings of falling out of love. To unlove reflected social conventions (e.g., ceasing to love the ‘wrong person’) and characterisations of a person (to unlove as a sign of fickleness). However, from a linguistic viewpoint, the term ‘to unlove’ also holds epistemological potential: the prefix ‘un-’ indicates the reversal of an event, implying that the word itself denotes progress and development.