Havisham: A Novel Inspired by Dickens’s Great Expectations

By Ronald Frame

HAVISHAM IS THE ASTONISHING PRELUDE TO CHARLES DICKENS'S GREAT EXPECTATIONS.

Before she became the immortal and haunting Miss Havisham of Great Expectations, she was Catherine, a young woman with all of her dreams ahead of her. Spry, imperious, she is the daughter of a wealthy brewer. But she is never far from the smell of hops and the arresting letters on the brewhouse wall—HAVISHAM—a reminder of all she owes to the family name and the family business.

Sent by her father to stay with the Chadwycks, Catherine discovers elegant pastimes to remove the taint of her family's new money. But for all her growing sophistication, Catherine is anything but worldly, and when a charismatic stranger pays her attention, everything—her heart, her future, the very Havisham name—is vulnerable.
In Havisham, Ronald Frame unfurls the psychological trauma that made young Catherine into Miss Havisham and cursed her to a life alone, roaming the halls of the mansion in the tatters of the dress she wore for the wedding she was never to have.
A Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction Book of 2013

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Nov 5, 2013
• ISBN: 9781250037299

Ronald Frame

RONALD FRAME was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and educated there and at Oxford University. He is also a dramatist, and winner of the Samuel Beckett Prize and the UK TV Industries’ Most Promising Writer New to Television Award. Many of his original radio plays have been broadcast by the BBC. His novel The Lantern Bearers was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, named the Scottish Book of the Year, and cited by the American Library Association (Barbara Gittings Honor Awards). He lives outside Glasgow.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

Four loud blows on the front door.

I stood waiting at the foot of the staircase as the door was opened.

The light from the candles fell upon their faces. Mr Jaggers’s, large and London-pale and mapped with a blue afternoon beard. A nursemaid’s, pink with excitement after listening on the journey down to Mr Jaggers’s discreet account of me – my wealth, my eccentric mode of life, my famous pride and prickliness.

And the third face. The child’s. She was standing a few paces behind the nursemaid; she was keeping back, but leaned over sharply to see between the two adults. She looked forward, into the house, across the hall’s black and white floor tiles.

When she was brought inside, I studied her, from my vantage-point on the second tread. Her complexion was a little tawny, as I had been led to expect. She had raven hair, which was more of the gypsy in her, but her eyes were blue, from the English father.

Blue, silvery-blue, and wide open, staring up at me. At where I stood, wearing the wedding dress I should have been married in.

I lifted my hand from the banister rail and moved to the step beneath.

Immediately the child turned away. She raised her shoulder as if to protect herself, and hid behind the nursemaid’s skirts. The woman smiled a nervous apology.

I retreated, one step up, then another.

‘Too much light,’ I said. ‘That’s all.’

The child’s eyes rested on my bride’s slippers. White satin originally, but soiled after these many months of wear.

‘The light dazzles her,’ I said. ‘She will adjust. She only needs to get her bearings.’

I

YOUNG CATHERINE

ONE

I killed my mother.

I had turned round in the womb, and the surgeon needed to cut her open to let me out. He couldn’t staunch her, and by the end of that evening she had bled to death.

*   *   *

My father draped the public rooms of Satis House in dust sheets. The chandeliers were left in situ, but wrapped in calico bags. The shutters were closed completely across some windows, and part-drawn at others.

My first days were lived out in a hush of respectfully lowered voices as a procession of folk came to offer their condolences.

My eyes became accustomed to the half-light.

*   *   *

One evening several new candles were set in one of the chandeliers. My mother’s clavecin was uncovered, and someone played it again – notwithstanding that it was out of tune – and that was the point at which the house stopped being a sepulchre and was slowly brought back to life.

*   *   *

It was the first word I remember seeing.

HAVISHAM.

Painted in green letters on the sooty brick of the brewhouse wall.

Fat letters. Each one had its own character.

Comfortable spreading ‘H’. Angular, proud ‘A’. Welcoming, open ‘V’. The unforthcoming sentinel ‘I’. ‘S’, a show-off, not altogether to be trusted. The squat and briefly indecisive, then reassuring ‘M’.

The name was up there even in the dark. In the morning it was the first thing I would look for from the house windows, to check that the wind hadn’t made off with our identity in the night or the slanting estuary rain washed the brickwork clean.

*   *   *

Jehosophat Havisham, otherwise known as Joseph Havisham, son of Matthias.

Havisham’s was the largest of several brewers in the town. Over the years we had bought out a number of smaller breweries and their outlets, but my father had preferred to concentrate production in our own (extended) works. He continued his father’s programme of tying in the vending sites, acquiring ownership outright or making loans to the publicans who stocked our beer.

Everyone in North Kent knew who we were. Approaching the town on the London road, the eye was drawn first to the tower of the cathedral and then, some moments later, to the name HAVISHAM so boldly stated on the old brick.

We were to be found on Crow Lane.

The brewery was on one side of the big cobbled yard, and our home on the other.

Satis House was Elizabethan, and took the shape of an E, with later addings-on. The maids would play a game, counting in their heads the rooms they had to clean, and never agreeing on a total: between twenty-five and thirty.

Once the famous Pepys had strolled by, and ventured into the Cherry Garden. There he came upon a doltish shopkeeper and his pretty daughter, and the great man ‘did kiss her’.

My father slept in the King’s Room, which was the chamber provided for Charles II following his sojourn in France, in 1660. The staircase had been made broader to accommodate the Merry Monarch as his manservants manoeuvred him upstairs and down. A second, steeper flight was built behind for the servants.

*   *   *

I grew up with the rich aroma of hops and the potent fumes from the fermenting rooms in my nostrils, filling my head until I failed to notice. I must have been in a state of perpetual mild intoxication.

I heard, but came not to hear, the din of the place. Casks being rolled across the cobbles, chaff-cutting, bottle-washing, racking, wood being tossed into the kiln fires. Carts rumbled in and out all day long.

The labourers had Herculean muscles. Unloading the sacks of malt and raising them on creaky pulleys; mashing the ground malt; slopping out the containers and vats; drawing into butts; pounding the extraneous yeast; always rolling those barrels from the brewhouse to the storehouse, and loading them on to the drays.

Heat, flames, steam, the dust clouds from the hops, the heady atmosphere of fermentation and money being made.

*   *   *

I was told by my father that the brewery was a parlous place for a little girl, and I should keep my distance. The hoists, the traps, those carts passing in and out; the horses were chosen for their strength, not their sensitivity, but every now and then one would be overcome with equine despair and make a bid for freedom, endangering itself and anyone in its path.

The brewhouse was only silent at night, and even then I heard the watchmen whistling to keep up their spirits in that gaunt and eerily echoing edifice, and the dogs for want of adventure barking at phantom intruders. The first brew-hands were there by five in the morning, sun-up, and the last left seventeen hours later, a couple of hours short of midnight.

I woke, and fell asleep, to the clopping of shod hooves, the whinnying of overworked carthorses.

*   *   *

‘It’s a dangerous place, miss,’ my nursemaids would repeat.

My father insisted. ‘Too many hazards for you to go running about.’

But should I ever complain about the noise, or the smell of hops or dropped dung, his response was immediate: this was our livelihood/if it was good enough for my grandfather/you’ll simply have to put up with it, won’t you, missy. So I learned not to comment, and if I was distracted from my lessons or my handiwork or my day-dreaming, I moved across to the garden side of the house. Out of doors, in the garden, the sounds would follow me, but there were flowers and trees to look at, and the wide Medway sky to traverse with my thoughts.

*   *   *

Sometimes I would see a man or a woman reeling drunk out of a pub, or I’d hear the singing and cursing of regulars deep in their cups.

That, too, was a part of who we Havishams were. But I would be hurried past by whoever was holding my hand, as if they had been issued with orders: the child isn’t to linger thereabouts, d’you understand. So we negotiated those obstacles double-quick, taking to side alleys if need be, to remove ourselves to somewhere more salubrious, while the rollicking voices sounded after us – but not their owners, thankfully grounded in a stupor.

TWO

At an upstairs window, in Toad Lane, a bald-headed doll craned forward. One eyelid was closed, so that the doll appeared to be winking. It knew a secret or two.

*   *   *

In Feathers Lane lived a man who pickled and preserved for a trade. In his window he displayed some of his wares.

There in one dusty jar a long-dead lizard floated, with its jaws open and the tiny serrations of teeth visible. In another, three frogs had been frozen eternally as they danced, legs trailing elegantly behind them. Next to that was a rolled bluish tongue of something or other.

In the largest jar a two-headed object with one body was suspended, and I somehow realised – before Ruth confirmed it for me – that these were the beginnings of people: two embryos that had grown into one.

The window horrified me, but – just as much – I was fascinated by it. On the occasions when I could persuade Ruth to take me into town or home again that way, I felt a mixture of cold shivers and impatience to reach the grimy bow-fronted window where I had to raise myself on tiptoe to see in.

*   *   *

I thought – was it possible? – that through the slightly bitter citrus fragrance of pomander I could smell further back, I could catch my mother’s sweet perfume and powder on the clothes stored flat in the press, years after she had last worn them.

*   *   *

I didn’t even know where my mother was buried.

‘Far off,’ my father said. ‘In a village churchyard. Under shade.’

I asked if we might go.

‘Your mother doesn’t need us now.’

‘Don’t we need her?’

‘Some things belong to the past.’

His face carried the pain it always did when I brought up the subject of my mother. His eyes became fixed, pebble-like, as if he were defying tears. I sometimes thought that in the process he was trying to convince himself he didn’t like me very much.

But those occasions would be followed by shows of kindness, by the purchase of another expensive plaything for me. This, the gift of the toy would be announcing, is how we attempt to put the sad parts of the past out of our minds.

I wondered if he really had recovered from the loss, or wasn’t still privately nursing his grief, battening it down inside himself.

*   *   *

I would hear the cathedral bells every morning and evening. On Sundays and High Days the air crumpled with the pealing of so many other bells, from our Saints, Gundulph and Margaret and Zachary and Jude. All that eloquent and silver-toned pressure to be devout, or at least to appear so.

*   *   *

On Sunday mornings we worshipped at ten.

We would walk to the cathedral. Across the brewery yard into Crow Lane. Across the open sward of the Vines, into the Precincts, past the end of Minor Canon Row, with the Old Palace on our left.

I would always keep two or three steps behind my father.

Along the approach of worn flagstones to the Great Porch. The archdeacon would bend low, his urgent hand pushing into the gloved palm of mine, because a brewer comes next to county stock, his is the aristocrat of trades. Even the lawyers and doctors stood back, and their eyepainted wives and petticoated daughters too, because they knew their place.

Into the gloom, into the reek of leather-bound hymnals and candlewax and withering tomb-flowers, that dry stale odour of old time oozing out of the stone. Heads would turn while I kept my gaze fixed straight ahead.

My sight adjusted to the little light. On the floor, pools of ruby and indigo from the stained window glass. The furious shimmer of candles stuck on spikes.

The pew creaked, it always creaked, as if the planed wood were sounding a complaint, a lament for the forest where it had grown.

In winter Ruth – or Eliza, who replaced her – provided me with a rug, a wrap, a muff, a coal foot-brazier, a water bottle. I imagined I was in a troika, speeding across a snowfield, the drowned Iven Meadow iced over. The ice sparked beneath the metal runners. Rime stiffened the horse’s mane, tail, my eyelashes. My breath streaked past me like thin blue smoke.

*   *   *

The noble families were customarily represented at the services, but individual members came and went, and seemed more often away, up in London or at a watering-place or visiting their circle at their grand homes, worshipping – if they did – in private chapels.

By comparison we Havishams were rooted to the spot. People expected to see us there, and I took their expectation as a kind of right, due acknowledgement of our importance in the local order.

*   *   *

I would sit looking at the painted stone effigies on their tombs. I fixed on this or that figure, kneeling or recumbent: on the ruff or cuffs, on the still folds of a dress or the smooth line of a hosed calf. I stared so hard that I passed into a kind of trance. I forced myself to keep staring, scarcely blinking my eyes, not moving a muscle, as if I was turned to stone myself. After three or four minutes of intense concentration I achieved my purpose, supposing I could catch faint signs of life: the twitch of a slipper, the flutter of an eyelid, the trembling of a finger where the hands were closed in zealous prayer.

The grand figures, dignitaries in their time, might be able to deceive the rest of the congregation, but they couldn’t fool me.

My father had to cough sometimes, or even reach across and shake my arm, to rouse me. I came back, but not quite willingly. In some ways I preferred my fear, the fright of discovering what I wasn’t meant to know, where the truth of a situation was turned inside out.

I breathed in, breathed out. I smelt the melting candlewax, the calf bindings of our hymn books, the stuffy air which was the same uncirculated air as last week’s.

When I looked again, the figures on their tombs were utterly still. Petrified. Incontrovertibly dead. Sharp-chinned, razor-nosed, prim-lipped, hands ardently clasped in supplication, that their souls should be received into Heaven.

*   *   *

We returned through the park opposite Satis House, known as The Vines. Originally it was the Monks’ Vineyard, when St Andrew’s Priory stood close by.

The rooks cawed in their high scrappy nests.

‘Come on, Catherine. Keep up.’

My father didn’t care for the monkish spirits of the place. We attended the cathedral because he wouldn’t have been treated with full seriousness in the town if we hadn’t, but his devotion was restricted to eighty minutes once a week. That was quite enough.

I never did get to the bottom of his reluctance, but I sensed that it had something to do with my mother’s shockingly sudden end: a death that had made no sense to him, then or now, for which nothing and no one – not even I – could console him.

But he didn’t talk about that; and in the house of (opportune, always dependable) silences we shared, neither did I.

THREE

I continued to be taken out for my constitutional every day, a walk lasting an hour or so.

Two hours of lessons in the morning, luncheon, and then some exercise.

Exercise for the body and – once I’d won the confidence of the looser-tongued maids – for my mind also.

*   *   *

I heard about the old man who sold death in bottles.

About Nurse Rooley, who took away the little unwanteds before the mother grew too swollen: a premature borning.

Florry Tonkin, who sold her affections by the hour.

Mr Yarker, who would model your enemies in wax, and puncture the spirit out of them.

Captain Breen – not really a captain at all – importer of oblivion from Shanghai, via Rotherhithe.

The Misses Ginger, who communed with the dead departed, and spoke in voices.

The Siamese twins in Love Lane, genies let out of the pickling jar, walking with three shoes and two hats; one happy and laughing, the other downcast and glowering.

Miss Greville, who fasted keenly, and scourged herself with a twig switch, and who walked to the cathedral at Easter in bare feet and at other times with pebbles in her shoes.

Another spinster, Miss Maxfield in dirty canary yellow, who stood on street corners fretting about crossing the road for half an hour at a stretch, stamping on the spot, pointing at imaginary obstacles with the Malacca cane of her yellow parasol.

Canon Arbuthnot, who would tell neighbours that a Frenchman or a German friend would shortly be calling; but those callers were never glimpsed, and it was said they too came out of a bottle, a French visitor from Burgundy country and a German from somewhere about the Rhône or Moselle.

The Ali Baba house, whose owner farmed sugar plantations abroad, where four gigantic vases stood in vaulted niches high on the street facade, exposed to everything the elements could throw at them.

Our venerable town.

*   *   *

Children, hand-picked, continued to come to Satis House.

No more than one or two at a time. And my father arranged to have us continuously supervised.

Thinking ourselves too old for playing, we behaved (as we thought) like young adults. I showed them my sewing, my drawings; we attempted a little rudimentary music-making; we walked in the garden. And, in short, we were thoroughly bored. We didn’t say anything that couldn’t be overheard.

I wondered what on earth was the point of it, unless my father liked to have reported back to him their envy for how I lived, wanting for nothing.

No one pitied me – or dared to mock me – for not having a mother.

The effect was to isolate me further, and to make me feel prouder still of my position.

*   *   *

I used my mother’s silver-backed hand mirror, given to her by my father. On the back was engraved a Gothic ‘H’.

It was large and heavy to hold. Its weight conferred solemnity. I would look into the oval of glass long and hard, hoping to find some trace of my mother in my own reflection. But I only ever saw a girl with a brow furrowed in concentration, a too straight line for a mouth, a nose which threatened towards the aquiline, and a look in her eyes which was articulating a fear of solitude.

*   *   *

My father ensured that I should lack for nothing material.

Clothes and shoes. Books, dolls. A wooden barrow for the garden, and a set of nurseryman’s tools. A leather horse on which to ride side-saddle. A box dulcimer, a recorder. A brush and comb of tortoiseshell inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Two oriental cats, which I called Silver and Gold.

I forget everything, because there was so much.

My father must have supposed that no other child could have had a happier time of it than I did. He showered me with gifts, which he didn’t consider treats but things I had a perfect right to enjoy. But even amplitude and generosity pall. When I was by myself, I had a finite amount of imagination to help me play; when another child was brought along, I became possessive, only because I was afraid of having to reveal my embarrassment at owning so much.

*   *   *

Mrs Bundy was our cook. She had come to us when I was very small. Her repertoire was limited, but my father preferred it to the more rarefied fare my mother had favoured.

To look at, she was striking rather than attractive. Wide eyes, a small tilted nose, and a large mouth that reached up into her cheeks when my father made her smile about something. A mane of thick brown hair which she wore rolled up and pinned behind, and was forever re-pinning. Large breasts, so that her apron usually carried a dusting of flour or whatever her chest came into contact with. She also had the curious habit of stepping out of her shoes when the kitchen grew too hot for her and walking about in bare feet, as if she considered herself mistress of this domain.

*   *   *

Mrs Bundy spoke about me. She told my father things he couldn’t have known otherwise: about my talking to the workers’ children, about disposing of my lunch vegetables in the fire or out of the window.

It was none of her business. Angry with her, I told my father I knew who was telling him.

‘It’s her.’

‘Catherine –’

‘Isn’t it?’

‘I don’t want to discuss –’

‘She’s just our cook.’

‘Don’t speak of Mrs Bundy so dismissively.’

‘But she has no right –’

‘D’you hear me, Catherine?’

He was taking her side – yet again.

Sometimes on my constitutional I passed where she lived.

*   *   *

She came from the other end of Crow Lane to ourselves, but not from the most deprived part of it as I might have expected. Being a cook in a rich man’s house, she must have managed to feed herself at her employer’s expense, certainly to look as wholesomely nourished as she did.

There was a boy too, a year or so younger than myself. I had glimpses of him, grown a little taller every time, but just as pale – he lacked his mother’s robustness – and just as nosy as I went on my way, accompanied by my maid for that afternoon. On one occasion I made a face at him, and the boy pretended to be affronted; but I realised too late that my mistake was to acknowledge him and to show him what he made me feel, and so I’d handed him the advantage of that moment.

I always had lunch on Sunday with my father, following our return from the cathedral.

Mrs Bundy would linger in the dining room, after we’d been served, after my father had been asked if everything was to his satisfaction. It seemed to me that it wasn’t her place. Several times I would notice my father’s eyes moving off her, and Mrs Bundy’s eyes narrowing as she looked at me, as if he was seeking a second opinion from her about me. And just as much as on the other account, it seemed to me that the woman exceeded herself.

*   *   *

Mrs Bundy had the task of supervising my other meals in my mother’s old sewing room.

‘My food’s not to your liking, miss?’

‘I’m not hungry.’

The fish stared up at me, its eye glazed with stupidity.

‘You will be by suppertime.’

‘How d’you know?’

‘I’ll take it away, shall I? My hard work.’

‘Take it away.’

‘Magic word, miss?’

‘Take it away – please.’

Later, when she was having some shut-eye wherever it was she went to take it, I would return to the kitchen and raid the storage jars, making the girls swear to secrecy. But – I see now – she must have known about that too, because how else was it that the jars were always kept topped up with currants, dried fruit, peel, nuts?

*   *   *

Mrs Bundy stands in the steam while pans simmer on the range. Bread is baking in the old oven, chestnuts – placed on the oven floor – are bursting their skins among the cinders.

She wipes perspiration from her jaw with the back of her hand. Her cuffs are undone and the sleeves rolled back. Her forearms are fleshy and white. Last summer they were fleshy but tanned, from her work in the kitchen garden; another summer on, she is pale, as a proper lady is pale, as her son is

Reviews for Havisham

[muddyboy · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is an overly ambitious attempt to write a prequel to Charles Dicken's classic novel, Great Expectations. The author is hoping to develop how Mrs. Havisham came to be they unhappy character of the later novel. I was hoping that Mr. Frame would come close to painting the well developed characters the Charles Dicken's did in the original book but this is where the book fails for me. Although the premise is creative, interesting and plausible the characters and settings are a shadow of what they were in Great Expectations. Mr.s Dickens does not have to worry..

[adonisguilfoyle · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Great Expectations is one of the few Dickens' novels I have actually read (sorry, Charles), so I always find myself tempted by 'parallel novels' which explore - or claim to - the familiar characters from the original story. Havisham is certainly better than Estella by Alanna Knight, but Ronald Frame's perfunctory prequel is more style than substance, and offers no new insight into the bitter and decayed Miss Havisham. He ticks all the boxes for updating the classics - first person narrative, modern heroine, adult themes - without really creating a sympathetic character or an interesting backstory.Catherine Havisham is a mug. She is gulled by almost everyone she meets, including her infamous fiance, Charles Compeyson, despite setting herself up to be a strong woman, taking control of her own life and her father's brewery. Instead of inviting the reader to view Catherine's claustrophobic world through her own eyes, however, Frame blathers on in his posturing prose, quoting Latin and padding out paragraphs by spouting poetry, and kills the connection. While Catherine is cultivating Sally, her proto-Estella, in the first few chapters, there is a glimmer of personality, but the young Miss Havisham soon descends into insanity, and Frame into cliches. Also, Catherine's aborted relationship with Compeyson, which should be the linchpin of the plot, surely, is over before any depth of feeling between them is really established. Suddenly we're back to the beginning of Great Expectations, and the (now randomly incontinent) Miss Havisham is grooming Estella to break Pip's heart. A good story, but told better elsewhere.The danger with novels like this is the thin line between creating a new layer and merely cashing in on the original. From a gripping opening line - 'I killed my mother' - and the potential to really bring Miss Havisham's twisted story to life, Frame takes the easy route and doesn't really say anything. Great timing, though, with yet another film adaptation of Great Expectations hitting the big screen!

[john257hopper · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

As its title suggests, this is a spin off novel about the life of one of Dickens's most memorable fictional creations from Great Expectations, Miss Havisham, the aged spinster who was jilted on her wedding day and shut herself off from the world in all her decaying wedding finery. As she is the most intriguing character in what is my favourite Dickens novel, I expected this to be a captivating read. So it was, but only in parts; it contained some flaws that let it down for me and prevented it from being the gem it could have been. It was certainly a slow starter, not necessarily a criticism, but the first 40% or so could almost have been lifted from an early 19th century novel (with the clashing exception of a sex scene), focusing on Miss Havisham's relationship with her brewer father and her growing up and entering polite society. She is jilted by Compeyson just over half way through the novel and this chapter (30) is very moving and dramatic. However, this is where a major flaw begins. It is clear from Dickens's novel that, when she is jilted, she immediately cuts herself off from society and enters her world of gloom and decay. In Mr Frame's novel, though, after a few days grieving (wearing her wedding dress) she picks herself up partially and returns to run her brewing business, uncovering growing signs of Compeyson's siphoning of funds to support her own half brother Arthur's gambling debts. She goes in search of her ex-fiance and tracks him down in Norwich, only to find that he has now enveigled into marriage her only real childhood friend, Sally. It is this betrayal that causes her to return to Satis House and shut herself off, abandoning the brewery and never again looking on the light of the sun. (She actually has duplicate wedding dresses made here, so it isn't the original she is wearing when she meets Pip). Pip comes into the novel and we see from Miss Havisham's point of view how she educates Estella to do to other men what Compeyson did to her, having become a machine for exacting revenge against the entire male species. Finally, she dies of burns from the accidental fire, but survives a little longer to regret how she has perverted her life and become like her former tormentor.I am glad I read this. It is well written and clearly the author has considerable literary talent (although he gets a bit carried away at times). We learn a lot about Miss Havisham's family history and especially about her father and half brother Arthur (offspring of her father's secret relationship with their housekeeper), though oddly the Pockets are hardly mentioned. I was rather annoyed by the inconsistencies, so this gets a somewhat ambiguous rating of 3.5/5

[birdo82 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Though not without its narrative kinks, Havisham is an affectionate and informed prelude to the Charles Dickens classic.

[elizabethcfelt · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

In this book, Frame allows one of the greatest characters in English literature to tell her story. Miss Havisham, from Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, is the crazy old lady who, after being abandoned at the altar, closes up her house, leaves the wedding feast to rot on the table and wears her wedding gown for the rest of her life. In Frame's story, we learn about Catherine Havisham's youth as the motherless daughter of a wealthy brewer. Catherine loves her father and is proud of the family name, but she has no peers. Lonely, she chooses Sally, the daughter of a servant, as her best friend. In her way, Catherine loves Sally, but they have an odd relationship. Catherine confides in Sally, but she never treats Sally as an equal, and Sally never confides in Catherine. Mr. Havisham, wanting his daughter to rise socially, sends Catherine to live with the aristocratic Chadwycks. From the Widow Chadwyck and her children, Catherine is meant to learn the manners, the dialect, and the ways of the gentry. They study the classics and arrange themselves in tableaux. However, the lessons she learns from the Chadwycks cause her to be romantically naïve and overly dramatic—setting her on the road to becoming the character we know she must become.Through his extraordinary writing, Frame gives the narrative to Miss Havisham, but does not make her sympathetic. The reader never feels close to her. Even as she tells the story, Catherine keeps us at a distance. Readers familiar with Great Expectations know the tragedy that will befall Miss Havisham. We cringe at her bad choices, wrong assumptions, and spiteful schemes, but realize that no other way lies before her. Frame clearly shows how a naïve brewer's daughter became the horrible Miss Havisham.

[violetthedwarf · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I couldn't get into this. I knew the outcome of the main characters story already, and it ruined any sense of discovery and made it hard for me to connect. I also felt like Frame didn't get into the heads of his characters very well.

I put it down around the half-way point, and never picked it up again.

[brendaklaassen · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I listened to this book because I was told it was very interesting and I had tried to read it once, but had given up on it. I did find the story was interesting this time. I don't always agree with Victorian attitudes, but the story was true to the time period. If the reader is a fan of "Dickens" then I suggest this book as a "Must read." The audio did assist the reader in discovering a new author.

[jen6e6moore · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I like what he's trying to do - the life story of Miss Catherine Havisham, birth to (after) death - but I don't think it's terribly successful. The success of a story like this hinges on the transition from young, naive Miss Havisham to old, bitter Miss Havisham, and that was the weakest part of the book. Also - she's just too *nice.* Miss Havisham in Great Expectations is a lot of things, but nice isn't one of them.

[cariola_6 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Imagining the life of a secondary figure in a classic novel can sometimes be a fruitful exercise and can lead to an intriguing new story. But sometimes, such imaginings fall flat, and unfortunately, that is the case with Ronald Frame's Havisham. I've never been a huge fan of Charles Dickens; in fact, I confess that, even though I am an English professor, I've never been able to drag myself through a complete Dickens novel. They dramatize well, however, and that is how I came to know Great Expectations. The idea of learning what might have happened to bring Miss Havisham to the state we see her in intrigued me. As a number of reviewers have noted, Frame's book starts out better than it ends--but that may not be saying much.Catherine Havisham is the only daughter of a successful brewery owner. Like many in the rising middle class of the day, her father uses his money to propel Catherine into a better social sphere--or so he hopes. She is kept away from the hard realities of the workers, allowed only to play for small supervised periods of time with hand-picked children, and later is sent to live with an upper class family for polishing. One would like to feel sorry for her, but Catherine is such a nincompoop and such an inveterate snob in her own right that it was downright impossible. First she "befriends" Sally, a local girl, by giving her cast-off clothes and allowing her the luxury of playing, now and then, with toys she could never hope to own. Later, she considers making Sally her maid, but, alas, Sally has taken employment elsewhere and soon stops answering Catherine's letters, which are full of descriptions of parties and travels and new dresses. Then she looks down her nose at the boy she discovers is her half-brother (her father not being the saint she thought him). Yes, the boy is indeed horrid, but if I had to deal with Catherine, I'm afraid I'd be tempted to bait her, too. Finally, she falls for Henry Compeysen, a man who, as far as I could see, had no apparent charms whatsoever (well, aside from causing the "stirring" and "wetness" between Catherine's legs, of which we get innumerable icky descriptions). Only a nincompoop like Catherine would be blind to the fact that this man felt no attraction to her whatsoever, never expressed any affection for her, and constantly came up with schemes to put himself in charge of the brewery--and her money. So, of course, she gets taken for a ride and dumped at the altar, and that is where the Miss Haversham we know from Great Expectations comes in.The adoption of Estella is as tacky as one would expect in this version of the story. Catherine has a pair of cats, and after the male is killed by locals, the female goes into mourning. Yes, the abandoned Catherine identifies with the cat (whose mate at least left through no desire of his own). Miraculously, although the cat has assumedly been spayed, she turns out to be pregnant, and watching her fuss over the kittens arouses Miss Haversham's maternal instincts, to the point that she buys a child from passing gypsies. But soon Estella becomes little more than a project for revenge on the opposite sex: beautiful and refined, she will be groomed for the purpose of leading men on, only to crush them. And Pip becomes a part of the experiment. Frame concludes the novel with Dickens's ending, but gives us a brief taste of what has happened to Estella and to Pip as well--none of which is particularly original or interesting.Well, by this time, you probably know that I won't be recommending Havisham, which was one of the more boring books I've read in quite some time, and not particularly well written either. Maybe I would have liked it more had I not just finished a string of pretty extraordinary novels . . . but I doubt it. On to better things.

[bookmagic_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

DNF'd, it was too slow and not that interesting. I would much rather re-read Great Expectations. Sometimes, most of the time really, we should leave characters to the original creator of them.

[casabooks · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Well, it was Not a Wonderful Life for Catherine - Miss Havisham. Finished this during the commercials for "It's a Wonderful Life" on TV tonight. Quite a contrast. Guess there were no huge surprises here - from all the sad circumstances that led to the Perpetual Wedding Attire.
But curiosity got the best of me and had to read all the strange fates and gossip that imagines the formation of one of literature's weirdest characters. Amen.

[etxgardener · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Miss Havisham is one of the most memorable of Dickens' characters and in Ronald Frame's novel he gives us her backstory and a first name - Catherine/ We find her in the beginning as a very young girl, the daughter of the wealthy owner of a Midlands brewery., whose mother has died giving her birth. She is a cosseted child who is dearly loved by her somewhat remote father, but strange things seem to be happening in their home. One of the servants, Mr. Bundy, seems to be more than a servant and a disagreeable boy named Arthur seems to know more about her than he should. Still, the family as one of the town's major employers is well respected and her father has great expectations (get it?) for her. She is sent to live with the Chadwycks, a family whose title puts them in the lower ranks of the aristocracy. There she is to learn the ways of the truly wealthy, eliminate the unsavory whiff of her family's new money and make a good marriage. All appears to be going well. She has the admiration of the eldest son of the family, plus their cousin Frederick (nicknamed Moses), but then appears a handsome stranger named Charles Compeyson, and we all know what's going to happen next.Meanwhile, her father announces that he has married Mrs. Bundy, and worse yet, the unpleasant boy, Arthur,, is really her half brother. Catherine tries to ignore this unpleasant development by spending most of her time with the Chadwyck's, but when her father's illness forces her to return home, she finds that Arthur is trying to make up for lost time by extracting as much money from her father (and the business) as possible. When her father dies, Catherine starts running the business but gets no respect from either the employees or the pub owners who are the business customers. Plus Arthur is still after her for money and seems to have a cozier relationship with with Charles Compeyson than would seem prudentOf course, anyone familiar with Dickens' story knows what happens next, and it is when Frame's story starts to merge with Dickens' that the novel starts to lose steam. The plot and the characters have been flushed out long ago and there isn't much that Frame can do without re-writing the original.

[juliestielstra · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I often have misgivings about "spinoffs." I bitterly resented Leavitt's "Calvin," who lifted Bill Watterson's resplendent brat and his philosophical stuffed tiger, and plopped him into an angst-ridden teen novel where Calvin is diagnosed as schizophrenic. Blecch. Then again, Lloyd Jones's "Mr Pip," built off Dickens's "Great Expectations," worked better than I had expected, and Peter Carey's "Jack Maggs" was a triumph. So I gave this one a shot. Frame creates a fuller back story for the pathetic Miss Havisham of "Great Expectations" (fertile ground, this novel, no?), wearing out her days - or rather, the same day, over and over and over - half-dressed in her wedding finery in commemoration of the day she is jilted at the altar by a scoundrel. She is bright, she is sharp, she is thorny in character, wealthy but from "trade," not true artistocracy. She does not, however, suspect that the noble family she is sent to live with to put the final social polish on her is simply being paid by her father. So she is always on the outside, looking in, and so tumbles hard for the sweet-talking rake Compeyson, another tolerated outsider. Once he has dumped her, after having insinuated himself into the family business, the workers become sullen, resistant to taking orders from a woman, and it's all downhill from there. Her Estella is meant to punish men for their treatment of women, but also to punish the innocent, society, and everyone else who has thwarted and disappointed her. And - of course - she learns her folly too late. Faithful in spirit to the original, Frame creates a believable, difficult history for this woman. The subplot of a maidservant she was fond of when they were children ending up married to Compeyson seems a bit pointless. But for a confirmed Dickens fan like me, this was worth the read.

The novel was written in 2012, narrated in first person from inside Catherine Havisham's mind. Written by a man. It did occur to me as I read that in 2017, this might raise questions or even ire. How dare he write a woman's thoughts, feelings, emotions, sensibilities (up to and including sexual arousal)? Do we allow such things these days? Is it gender appropriation? But... but... how can a 21st century writer write a 19th century novel? I don't have answers and the questions trouble me. I guess it is a sign of the times that they even occurred to me...