Evelyn Juers Exile. "Scintillating and rather magical... "House of Exile" is an extraordinary book, and a really rare accomplishment."() "The Recluse" (2012) is a long biographical essay about Eliza Emily Donnithorne, who lived most of her life in isolation in a large house in the Sydney suburb of Newtown. She is thought to have been the model for the character of Miss Havisham in Charles Dickens’ "Great Expectations", who was jilted at the altar, and became a recluse, wearing her wedding dress, and keeping her wedding banquet set, until the day she died. But did it really happen like this? "The Recluse"
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: