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    Havisham: A Novel Inspired by Dickens’s Great Expectations
    Havisham: A Novel Inspired by Dickens’s Great Expectations
    Havisham: A Novel Inspired by Dickens’s Great Expectations
    Audiobook10 hours

    Havisham: A Novel Inspired by Dickens’s Great Expectations

    Written by Ronald Frame

    Narrated by Sophie Ward

    3/5

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    About this audiobook

    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

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Audio
    Release dateNov 5, 2013
    ISBN9781427235275
    Author

    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.

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    Reviews for Havisham

    3/5

    49 ratings13 reviews

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    • 3/5
      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...
    • 3/5
      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.
    • 3/5
      Though not without its narrative kinks, Havisham is an affectionate and informed prelude to the Charles Dickens classic.
    • 3/5
      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.
    • 3/5
      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.
    • 1/5
      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.
    • 3/5
      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.
    • 3/5
      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.
    • 2/5
      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.
    • 2/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      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..
    • 4/5
      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
    • 2/5
      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!