Eliza Emily Donnithorne time in Australia, told the story to their father. However, they arrived in Australia after "Great Expectations" was published. Other historians propose an alternative explanation: that Dickens did not base Miss Havisham on Donnithorne, but that Sydney readers drew the connection when "Great Expectations" was published in 1861, and over time embellished Donnithorne's story with details borrowed from Dickens' book. This is the tentative conclusion reached by Evelyn Juers in her 2012 book "The Recluse", the most thorough recent investigation of the story. Opera: "Miss Donnithorne's Maggot" is an operatic work, with music by Peter Maxwell Davies and text by
Mary Dickens to have embarrassed or angered her family, who largely cut themselves off from her. Much of her life after her father's death in 1870 remains unknown, but after leaving her aunt's she lived for a period with a clergyman and his wife, Mr and Mrs Hargreaves, in Manchester, a "scandal" which was kept a secret by her family. Later she lived alone in the country. Mary Dickens went on to write "My Father as I Recall Him" (1886), and a novel, "Cross Currents" (1890). On Mary's death her aunt, Georgina Hogarth, wrote to Connie Dickens, the widow of Edward Dickens: