Who Is Miss Havisham?:-Miss Havisham is one of the main character's in Great Expectations by Charles Dickens.

William Congreve,
the English playwright and poet once wrote: 'Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.' This
quotation serves as an apt description of Miss Havisham.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". In her youth, she fell in love with an unscrupulous suitor, Compeyson, who abandoned her on their wedding day. This emotionally
traumatic event defines the rest of Miss Havisham's life, and she never moves past the moment in which Compeyson broke her heart. As a
result, her heart is filled with rage toward all men, not just the one who betrayed her.

.Miss Havisham's father was a wealthy brewer and her mother died shortly after she was born. Her father later remarried and had a son,
Arthur, with the household cook. Although they grew up together, Miss Havisham's relationship with her half-brother was far from harmonious.
.She inherited most of her father's fortune and fell in love with a man named Compeyson, who conspired with the jealous Arthur to swindle
her of her riches. Her cousin, Matthew Pocket, warned her to be careful, but she was too much in love to listen. On the wedding day, while she
was dressing, Miss Havisham received a letter from Compeyson and realised he had defrauded her and she had been left at the altar.

Miss Havisham with Estella and Pip :-Humiliated and heartbroken, Miss Havisham suffered a mental breakdown and
remained alone in her decaying mansion Satis House – never removing her wedding dress, wearing only one shoe, leaving the wedding
breakfast and cake uneaten on the table, and allowing only a few people to see her. She even had the clocks in her mansion stopped at twenty
minutes to nine: the exact time when she had received Compeyson's letter.

.Time passed and Miss Havisham had her lawyer, Mr. Jaggers, adopt a daughter for her. I had been shut up in these rooms a long time (I don't
know how long; you know what time the clocks keep here), when I told him that I wanted a little girl to rear and love, and save from my fate. I
had first seen him when I sent for him to lay this place waste for me; having read of him in the newspapers, before I and the world parted. He
told me that he would look about him for such an orphan child. One night he brought her here asleep, and I called her Estella.

Appearance and Home:-Charles Dickens describes Miss Havisham as an immensely rich and grim lady who lives in a large and
dismal house barricaded against robbers, and who leads a life of seclusion.

As a little boy, Pip, the novel's protagonist and the eyes and ears of the story, meets Miss Havisham at Satis House, the spooky place she calls
home. Miss Havisham invites Pip over to play with her ward, Estella. However, Miss Havisham's real scheme is to get Pip to fall in love with
Estella as he grows up. Pip believes Miss Havisham is the most peculiar woman he has ever met. The wedding dress she wears may be
yellowed, but it’s made of “satins, and lace, and silks.” Jewels are spread on her dressing table. More jewels wink on her fingers and at her
neck.In this passage, he describes what she looks like:”'She was dressed in rich materials - satins, and lace, and silks - all of white. Her shoes
were white. And she had a long white veil dependent from her hair, and she had bridal flowers in her hair, but her hair was white. Some bright
jewels sparkled on her neck and on her hands, and some other jewels lay sparkling on the table. Dresses, less splendid than the dress she wore,
and half-packed trunks, were scattered about. She had not quite finished dressing for she had but one shoe on - the other was on the table near
her hand. . .”'

When Pip first meets the aging Miss Havisham, he’s only seven years old. An orphan from the village, he lives with his sister and her kindly
blacksmith husband. Pip is poor, and Miss Havisham is rich. Very rich. she appears as she did on her wedding day after learning that her groom
was not going to show up: wearing her wedding dress and one wedding shoe, the other still waiting for her to put on. At the moment of her
betrayal, time stops for Miss Havisham; even the remains of her untouched wedding breakfast and cake have been left on the table. The room
he’s brought to that fateful morning is lit by candles. No sunlight comes in. Miss Havisham’s watch and a clock on the wall are both stopped at
twenty minutes to nine. An interesting side note: In Victorian times, if a household was in mourning, the clocks of the house might be stopped
at the time the death occurred and, while the body remained in the house, all the curtains drawn. Seeing Miss Havisham for the first time,
shrunken and “withered” in the wedding dress, Pip is too scared to even cry out: “Once, I had been taken to one of our old marsh churches to
see a skeleton in the ashes of a rich dress, that had been dug out of a vault under the church pavement. Now, waxwork and skeleton seemed to
have dark eyes that moved and looked and moved at me. The twenty-to-nine position of the clocks marks the time when Miss Havisham
received a letter from her betrothed calling off the wedding that she was even then dressing for. We learn more about this betrayal later. For
now, what we know is what Pip knows: if she’s a corpse, it’s love that has killed her.

When Miss Havisham meets Pip, she places her hand over her heart and asks him what is there. After Pip tells Miss Havisham it is her heart, she
utters one word: 'Broken.'

From protection to revenge:-While Miss Havisham's original goal was to prevent Estella from suffering as she had at the hands
of a man, it changed as Estella grew older:

Believe this: when she first came, I meant to save her from misery like my own. At first I meant no more. But as she grew, and promised to be
very beautiful, I gradually did worse, and with my praises, and with my jewels, and with my teachings, and with this figure of myself always
before her a warning to back and point my lessons, I stole her heart away and put ice in its place.

While Estella was still a child, Miss Havisham began casting about for boys who could be a testing ground for Estella's education in breaking the
hearts of men as vicarious revenge for Miss Havisham's pain. Pip, the narrator, is the eventual victim; and Miss Havisham readily dresses Estella
in jewels to enhance her beauty and to exemplify all the more the vast social gulf between her and Pip. When, as a young adult, Estella leaves
for France to receive education, Miss Havisham eagerly asks him, "Do you feel you have lost her?"

Repentance and death:-Miss Havisham is begging Pip for his forgiveness .

.Miss Havisham repents late in the novel when Estella leaves to marry Pip's rival, Bentley Drummle; and she realises that she has caused Pip’s
heart to be broken in the same manner as her own; rather than achieving any kind of personal revenge, she has only caused more pain. Miss
Havisham begs Pip for forgiveness.

Until you spoke to [Estella] the other day, and until I saw in you a looking-glass that showed me what I once felt myself, I did not know what I
had done. What have I done! What have I done!

.After Pip leaves, Miss Havisham's dress catches on fire from her fireplace. Pip rushes back in and saves her. However, she has suffered severe
burns to the front of her torso (she is laid on her back), up to the throat. The last words she speaks in the novel are (in a delirium) to Pip,
referencing both Estella and a note she, Miss Havisham, has given him with her signature: "Take the pencil and write under my name, 'I forgive
her!'"

.A surgeon dresses her burns, and says that they are "far from hopeless". However, despite rallying for a time, she dies a few weeks later,
leaving Estella as her chief beneficiary, and a considerable sum to Herbert Pocket's father, as a result of Pip's reference.