Full passage and quote from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), in which Jane and Rochester converse:
"It is a long way," I again said.
"It is, to be sure; and when you get to Bitternutt Lodge, Connaught, Ireland, I shall never see you again, Jane: that's morally certain. I never go over to Ireland, not having myself much of a fancy for the country. We have been good friends, Jane; have we not?"
"Yes, sir."
"And when friends are on the eve of separation, they like to spend the little time that remains to them close to each other. Come! we'll talk over the voyage and the parting quietly half-an-hour or so, while the stars enter into their shining life up in heaven yonder: here is the chestnut tree: here is the bench at its old roots. Come, we will sit there in peace to-night, though we should never more be destined to sit there together." He seated me and himself.
"It is a long way to Ireland, Janet, and I am sorry to send my little friend on such weary travels: but if I can't do better, how is it to be helped? Are you anything akin to me, do you think, Jane?"
I could risk no sort of answer by this time: my heart was still.
"Because," he said, "I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you--especially when you are near me, as now: it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if that boisterous Channel, and two hundred miles or so of land come broad between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapt; and then I've a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly. As for you,--you'd forget me."
"That I NEVER should, sir: you know--" Impossible to proceed.
"Jane, do you hear that nightingale singing in the wood? Listen!"
Edward Rochester and Jane Eyre are also shown to have a supernatural connection throughout Jane Eyre; and, true to the Chinese legend, the two end up in love and married by the end. Was it possible that Charlotte Brontë knew about the Chinese legend, or are the similarities pure coincidence?
Thanks to /u/hellcatfighter for the manual alert on this question, but I am traveling and on sabbatical from /r/askhistorians. Besides that, I know very little about Jane Eyre or Chinese folklore. Oh, but wait. This is an intriguing question. Damn it.
I just happen to have published a little bit on Jane Eyre and its relation to folklore, and within that passage, there may be some insight that can help us understand what Charlotte Brontë’s perspective was in this matter. The following is an excerpt from my book, The Folklore of Cornwall: The Oral Tradition of a Celtic Nation (Exeter, 2018); this deals with a well-known European legend of the fairy midwife; its Cornish version favors a nurse caring for a child rather than the more common midwife assisting with birth:
Another word is warranted about the usual form of the Cornish legend of the human nurse and her piskie employer. With these stories, the focus is on the idea of a governess who cares for the child after birth, violates the order to stay away from a room in the mansion, and is then exiled from the place and often from her master whom she has come to love. This is reminiscent of Charlotte Brontë’s (1816–1855) novel, Jane Eyre, which was published in 1847 before the Hunt and Bottrell collections appeared. The mother of the Brontë sisters was from Cornwall, and after her premature death, her sister raised the motherless children. It is possible that one of these Cornish women could have introduced young Charlotte to the story of the nurse and her ward in a strange mansion. Whether a Cornish version of ML 5070 was an inspiration for Jane Eyre remains to be demonstrated adequately, but the similarity is worth noting.
The citation for the paragraph reads as follows:
Several websites, none of which have academic credibility and therefore need not be mentioned specifically, allude to the similarity between the novel and the legend. See, however, Jacqueline Simpson, ‘The Functions of Folklore in “Jane Eyre” and “Wuthering Heights”’, Folklore, 85:1 (January 1974), pp. 47–61. Motif C.611, the forbidden chamber, is found in a variety of folktales, and especially in ATU 311 and a related type, ATU 312, Bluebeard.
The point here is how it appears that Brontë may have drawn on folklore, but it was the folklore she knew, namely British, and in this instance, specifically Cornish. I really doubt there could be a Chinese connection as that doesn’t seem likely given the author’s background and life. More likely, I suspect we are seeing a generic concept that easily manifests in unrelated cultures without any specific connection.
edit: thanks for the gold! Very kind!