The Classic

The novel is, of course, inspired by Great Expectations. But its second source is Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, published in 1847. Dickens disliked it and other Victorian novels enough to parody their fairy-tale motifs, creating a version—published in 1861—that is far less romantic and more attuned to the harsh realities of English society. There are many parallel characters in the two classics.

I see Miss Havisham as a composite of Bronte’s tormented Edward Rochester of Thornfield Hall and his wife Bertha Antoinetta Mason, the “mysterious lunatic” secretly kept under lock and key in the mansion’s tower. Bronte shows us only Bertha’s violent insanity, chalking it up to genetic predisposition, presenting her primarily as an obstacle to the happiness of the virtuous governess Jane Eyre and her employer. But in Wide Sargasso Sea, published in 1966, British author Jean Rhys digs deeper, placing Bertha in the context of her native Jamaica. Through Rhys’s 20th-century lens, Bertha’s madness becomes an understandable if not logical response to the colonialism and patriarchy that allow her no control over her own destiny.

Similarly, Miss Havisham is a casualty of rigid society, but, for me, her madness is also a source of the power she wields over the people around her. Some dismiss her as weak; I see her as incredibly strong-willed and tenacious—the ultimate “drama queen.” These contradictions sparked my curiosity and fueled my imagining of her story. According to Dickens’s timeline notes, Miss Havisham would have been a contemporary of Jane Austen, and so that beloved author’s life and works influenced my narrative as well.

With a past reaching back to Roman times, the ancient city of Rochester rests alongside the River Medway, just thirty miles east of central London and forty-five miles west of the channel ports. It is home to England’s second oldest cathedral and a medieval castle that represents one of the country’s finest examples of Norman architecture. Charles Dickens lived in the area as a child and as an author, featuring the city and its denizens in a number of his works, including Great Expectations, The Pickwick Papers, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood, his final and incomplete novel.

Restoration House, a short walk from the castle and cathedral, served as Dickens’s model for Miss Havisham’s Satis House. The manor name derives from a stay by Charles II on the eve of his return to the English throne in 1660. Dickens himself was rumored to have been seen leaning against the iron gates on the day before he died in 1870. Today visitors can tour the house and gardens, as well as the cathedral and castle.

Known as “liquid bread,” beer has long been a staple of the human diet and remains the world’s most popular fermented beverage. The ancient craft of brewing figures prominently in English history and in the life of Miss Havisham, whose father was a wealthy brewer. His business adjoined the manor house and provides rich context for the family’s story.