“For a Twist: Before she took to pacing about her cobwebbed London manse in a tattered wedding gown, literature's most famous jilted bride, Miss Havisham, ran the family brewery. “Charles Dickens never revealed Miss Havisham's backstory in Great Expectations, but Ronald Frame fills in the blanks with his illuminating prequel.Frame has brought a clean, modern sensibility to his rendering of the tale.intensely entrancing.” - Entertainment Weekly I don't know if Dickens would have been a fan, but I am.” - Owen King, Los Angeles Review of Books a master of the historical milieu.The nightmare crone of Great Expectations has been made animate. What a plunge.” - Louise Bayard, The Washington Post Book World “Delicate and closely observed.What a lark.

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.Ī Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction Book of 2013 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. Sent by her father to stay with the Chadwycks, Catherine discovers elegant pastimes to remove the taint of her family's new money and better blend into the upper echelons of Victorian England. 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. Spry, imperious, she is the daughter of a wealthy brewer. HAVISHAM IS THE ASTONISHING PRELUDE TO CHARLES DICKENS'S GREAT EXPECTATIONS.īefore 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.

Havisham by ronald frame