Miss Havisham

Miss Havisham is the reclusive, embittered gentlewoman of Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, published in 1861. Jilted at the altar decades before the novel begins, she has stopped every clock in her decaying mansion, Satis House, at the exact moment she received the news, and continues to wear her now-yellowed wedding dress and half-eaten wedding cake sits rotting in the room where the ceremony would have taken place. She raises her adopted daughter Estella specifically to be cold and beautiful, using her as an instrument of revenge against men, including the novel's protagonist Pip, who falls hopelessly in love with Estella under Miss Havisham's encouragement. Late in the novel Miss Havisham comes to recognize the cruelty of what she has done to both Estella and Pip, and she dies after her dress catches fire, an accident widely read as symbolically consuming the life she froze in place decades earlier. Miss Havisham has become one of the most recognizable figures in English literature for the image of arrested time and grief curdled into vengeance.