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
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: