In modern parlance, she “let herself go”, leaned so far back she disappeared from the public eye.

Dickens’s Miss Havisham kept her wedding feast rotting with maggots for all to see, wore her wedding dress for the rest of her life, and never let the sunlight in.

Phil, encouraged to hit the gym again, work on their self-confidence, enjoy the finer things in life that their wealth is able to buy them, “lean in” and hang on to a career ladder-any ladder-for dear life. Modern-day Miss Havishams would be given a stern talking to on television by Dr. In our present lives, however, we might be hard-pressed to find a woman who stops all the clocks because she’s been hurt in love and betrayed by the man she trusted completely. Miss Havishams abound in a heterosexist culture. Dickens, being Dickens, was able to write a brutal yet tender representation of a scorned, damaged woman that seemed like both of an indictment of the patriarchal culture that made her that way while simultaneously indulging in the misogyny that sees her as aberrant, even abject. Heterosexual manly-men, who should like their women soft, yielding, and accommodating, must run from her or gawk from afar. No self-respecting nubile young girl would want to be her. The village gossip has made her larger than life a witch of outsized proportions who is not just mad, but mad in a particularly female way.Īll we know of Miss Havisham we see through Pip’s eyes-what hangs over her is the spectre of soured sexuality, ruined before its prime. When Pip in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations meets Miss Havisham, she has an entire reputation to live up to. In Havisham, Ronald Frame unfurls the psychological trauma that made young Catherine into Miss Havisham and cursed her to a life alone, roaming the halls of the mansion in the tatters of the dress she wore for the wedding she was never to have.A wealthy old spinster who lives in a crumbling mansion named Satis House, jilted at the altar and still wearing her wedding dress, hell bent on revenge on all men. But for all her growing sophistication, Catherine is anything but worldly, and when a charismatic stranger pays her attention, everything-her heart, her future, the very Havisham name-is vulnerable. Sent by her father to stay with the Chadwycks, Catherine discovers elegant pastimes to remove the taint of her family's new money. But she is never far from the smell of hops and the arresting letters on the brewhouse wall-HAVISHAM-a reminder of all she owes to the family name and the family business. Spry, imperious, she is the daughter of a wealthy brewer. HAVISHAM IS THE ASTONISHING PRELUDE TO CHARLES DICKENS'S GREAT EXPECTATIONS.īefore she became the immortal and haunting Miss Havisham of Great Expectations, she was Catherine, a young woman with all of her dreams ahead of her.

Havisham by Ronald Frame