Miss Havisham Miss Havisham Miss Havisham is a character in the Charles Dickens novel "Great Expectations" (1861). She is a wealthy spinster, once jilted at the altar, who insists on wearing her wedding dress for the rest of her life. She lives in a ruined mansion with her adopted daughter, Estella. Dickens describes her as looking like "the witch of the place". Although she has often been portrayed in film versions as very elderly, Dickens's own notes indicate that she is only in her mid-fifties. However, it is indicated in the novel that her long life away from the sunlight has aged
Miss Havisham dressing, Miss Havisham received a letter from Compeyson and realised he had defrauded her and she had been left at the altar. Humiliated and heartbroken, Miss Havisham suffered a mental breakdown and remained alone in her decaying mansion Satis House – never removing her wedding dress, wearing only one shoe, leaving the wedding breakfast and cake uneaten on the table, and allowing only a few people to see her. She even had the clocks in her mansion stopped at twenty minutes to nine: the exact time when she had received Compeyson's letter. Time passed and Miss Havisham had her lawyer,