Great Expectations

Miss Havisham is a significant character in the Charles Dickens novel Great Expectations . She is a wealthy spinster, who lives in her ruined mansion... with her adopted daughter, Estella, while she herself is described 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 also indicated that her long life away from the sunlight has in itself aged her, and she is said to look like a cross between a waxwork and a skeleton, with moving eyes. Miss Havisham's mother passed away when she was just a baby, and her father, a wealthy brewer, spoiled her as a result. When he died, he left most of his money as inheritance for her. As an adult, she fell in love with a man named Compeyson, who was only out to swindle her of her riches. Her cousin Matthew Pocket warned her to be careful, but she was too much in love to listen. At twenty minutes to nine on their wedding day, while she was dressing, Havisham received a letter from Compeyson and realized that he had defrauded her and she had been left at the altar.
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A novel is a long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the... tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century. The further definition of the genre is historically difficult. Most of the criteria are arbitrary and designed to raise further debates over qualities that will supposedly separate great works of literature both from a wider and lower "trivial" production and from the field of true histories. To become part of the literary production novels have to address the discussion of art. The construction of the narrative, the plot, the way reality is created in the work of fiction, the fascination of the character study, and the use of language are usually discussed to show a novel's artistic merits. Most of these requirements were introduced in the 16th and 17th centuries, in order to give fiction a justification outside the field of factual history.
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