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 brew house 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.
"This literary prequel imagines the life of Catherine Havisham, from privileged childhood to the macabre death scene of Dickens's Great Expectations....Frame's book is a pleasurable read."
The New Yorker
"Delicate and closely observed....Frame has a nice feel for the epiphanic shudders of a young woman's heart and a watercolorist's eye for English landscapes....What a lark. What a plunge."
Louis Bayard, The Washington Post
"Catherine's considerable ego is juxtaposed by more attractive qualities: following her father's death she is a tough, capable businesswoman during a period and at place when such a thing was unheard of; she has carnal desires that she acts on. It's an excruciatingly human rendering, flawed and frustrating. The nightmare crone of Great Expectations has been made animate. I don't know if Dickens wo
