"Love her, love her, love her! If she favours you, love her. If she wounds you, love her. If she tears your heart to pieces – and as it gets older and stronger, it will tear deeper – love her, love her, love her!" ― Chapter 29
Miss Havisham is a major character in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. She is the half-sister of Arthur Havisham, the ex-fiancée of Compeyson, and the adoptive mother of Estella.
Traumatized after her fiancé abandoned her at their wedding altar, Miss Havisham is determined to extract her revenge against men by raising Estella to break their hearts, especially Pip. She is unaware she is only causing more pain to others.
Description[]
Storyline[]
Early Life/Courtship with Compeyson[]
Miss Havisham was born to a wealthy gentleman named Mr. Havisham, who made his fortune by running a brewery.[1]Her mother died when she was a baby, and her father spoiled her as a child. Sometime later, Mr. Havisham secretly remarried his cook, and they had a son named Arthur. After his second wife’s death, he welcomed Arthur into the family.
Arthur fell into bad habits as a young adult, and his father disinherited him. But shortly before he died, he changed his mind and left him a small fortune. Now a young woman, Miss Havisham had inherited her father’s money and was a wealthy heiress, while Arthur wasted away all his inheritance. At the same time, Miss Havisham and her half-brother hated each other, and he blamed her for his father’s anger.
Later, she met Compeyson, a showy gentleman, who started a courtship with her, and she madly fell in love with him. In addition, he received large sums of money from her and even convinced her to buy out her brother’s share of the brewery, but told her that once they were married, he would claim ownership of the brewery, as he was actually poor.
Miss Havisham’s cousin, Matthew Pocket, warned her that she was doing too much for her fiancé and allowing too much control over him. She didn’t listen to him and accused him of hating her fiancé as he interfered to fawn over her. Afterwards, she cut off all contact with Matthew Pocket.
The couple’s wedding date was set, with all the preparations made from the guests to the wedding tour. But Compeyson never showed up. While Miss Havisham was busy putting on her wedding gown, she received a letter from him. He wrote that he decided to call off their marriage, and they wouldn’t get married. Devastated by the news, she fell ill with a terrible illness and never recovered from this tragic event. She stopped all the clocks in her home, Satis House, at twenty minutes to nine, the exact time she learned that Compeyson had left her. She never took off her wedding dress and veil and only wore one shoe, as she never wore the second pair when she learned of her fiancé’s betrayal. In addition, she let her wedding feast rot in the other room, and her house began to fall into disrepair, and she never saw the sunlight again.
It was believed that her ex-fiancé Compeyson conspired with Arthur Havisham, and it was Arthur’s plan to humiliate her financially and emotionally.
Adopting Estella[]
After being confined in her house for so long, Miss Havisham felt lonely. She consulted a London lawyer named Mr. Jaggers and said she longed to have a young girl to raise as her own child and save her from her fate.[2]She had first heard of him from the newspapers before she isolated herself from the outside world.
Mr. Jaggers said he would search for an orphaned girl and one night, he brought her a girl who was 2-3 years old. The child’s mother had tried to kill her, and her father, who was in hiding to avoid being a witness at the mother’s trial, was unaware that she was alive. Miss Havisham adopted the girl and named her Estella. As Estella grew up, Miss Havisham taught her to be cold-hearted and break men’s hearts, just like how Compeyson broke her heart when he left her. She even invited Matthew’s son Herbert for a trial period to play with Estella and be a pawn to her coldness, but it failed as Herbert wasn’t interested in Estella.
Pip’s First Visit to Satis House[]
Sometime later, Miss Havisham invites a local orphan name Pip over to Satis House and hopefully make him a victim to Estella’s coldness.[3] She invites him into her room, and he introduces himself. She beckons him closer so she could examine him and asks if he isn’t afraid of a woman who has never seen the sun before he was born. He says no, and she places her hand on her heart, saying it’s broken.
Personality/Appearance[]
Miss Havisham is an eccentric, reclusive elderly woman who confines herself in her home, stopping all the clocks at twenty minutes to nine and always wearing her wedding dress. Since her fiancé abandoned her at the altar, she has been so traumatized that she never recovers from the incident. Rather than trying to move on, she stays in the exact moment when her fiancé never arrived, and even becomes obsessed with all the major objects around her connected to her rejected wedding day, such as her wedding cake and the vanity where her one shoes she never wears is placed on the table.
She also becomes obsessed with revenge and is determined to have men pay the price for breaking her heart. By adopting Estella, she raises her to be a weapon to achieve her revenge on men, and Estella would be cold-hearted towards them and break their hearts.