Hiring a mistress is the next worse thing to buying a slave: both are often by nature, and always by position, inferior: and to live familiarly with inferiors is degrading.
– Charlotte Bronte
Jane Eyre, Chapter 27. Rochester doesn’t have much respect for mistresses. He equates hiring them to buying a slave and describes them as inferior. Acknowledging his past debauched existence, he admits to having “one mistress and then another” upon learning of his wife’s madness.