Publisher's Synopsis
Great Expectations is a novel by Charles Dickens, edited in 1861. It depicts the growth and personal development of an orphan named Pip. Great Expectations is a bildungsroman, or a coming-of-age novel. It is set among the marshes of Kent and in London in the early-to-mid 1800s. On Christmas Eve, around 1812, Pip, an orphan who is approximately six years old, encounters an escaped convict in the village churchyard while visiting the graves of his mother and father, as well as those of his siblings. The convict scares Pip into stealing food for him, and a file to grind away his shackles, from the home he shares with his abusive older sister and her kind, passive husband Joe Gargery, a blacksmith. The next day, soldiers recapture the convict, and another, while they are engaged in a fight; the two are returned to the prison ships whence they escaped. Dickens' novel has influenced a number of writers, Sue Roe's Estella: Her Expectations (1982), for example explores the inner life of an Estella fascinated with a Havisham figure. Miss Havisham is again important in Havisham: A Novel (2013), a book by Ronald Frame, that features an imagining of the life of Miss Catherine Havisham from childhood to adulthood. The second chapter of Rosalind Ashe's Literary Houses (1982) paraphrases Miss Havisham's story with details about the nature and structure of Satis House and coloured imaginings of the house within. Miss Havisham is also central to Lost in a Good Book (2002), Jasper Fforde's alternate history, fantasy novel, which features a parody of Miss Havisham. It won the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association 2004 Dilys Award. Magwitch is the protagonist of Peter Carey's Jack Maggs, which is a re-imagining of Magwitch's return to England, with the addition, among other things, of a fictionalised Dickens character and plot-line. Carey's novel won the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 1998. Mister Pip (2006) is a novel by Lloyd Jones, a New Zealand author. The winner of the 2007 Commonwealth Writers' Prize, Lloyd Jones's novel is set in a village on the Papua New Guinea island of Bougainville during a brutal civil war there in the 1990s, where the young protagonist's life is impacted in a major way by her reading of Great Expectations.
