Diminishing heartbreak

Can Dickens’ Miss Havisham be brought back to life, asks Clare Clark.

of the literary prequel or sequel has a long and chequered history.

A few, like Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, have gone on to become classics in their own right. Many more are disappointing, clumsy pastiches or pale imitations of the original. And still the temptation remains to breathe fresh life into the immortal characters of fiction.

Peter Pan, Long John Silver, Scarlett O’Hara, Elizabeth Bennet – we part with them as though with friends, with the greatest reluctance. They seem too vital, too real, to be condemned forever to a few hundred measly pages. Pride and Prejudice alone has inspired more than 70 spin-offs.

The most successful of such novels take as their starting point things that are missing from the original text, exploring their silences, their lacunae. Geraldine Brooks’ which imagined Louisa Alcott’s from the perspective of the girls’ absent father, won the 2006 Pulitzer prize. As for Bertha Mason, the ‘‘clothed hyena’’ in she is a shadowy figure with neither voice nor history, as hidden from view in the text as she is in the attic at Thornfield. ‘‘She seemed such a poor ghost,’’ Rhys was later to say. ‘‘I thought I’d like to write her a life.’’

In Ronald Frame seeks to tell the story from the side of another famously unhinged 19th century character, Miss Havisham from Great Expectations.

Unlike Bertha, Miss Havisham has a history – she is the daughter of a wealthy brewer who left her a fortune, while her erstwhile bridegroom was a slippery swindler. Working within this framework, Frame attempts to explain how a girl with great expectations of her own might become the spectral and embittered Miss Havisham, seeking to avenge herself on men through her beautiful, unfeeling ward, Estella. Frame may have expropriated Charles Dickens’ character but his style is quite different. Elusive, dreamlike, the story is constructed in scraps and fragments, cut with filmic rapidity like images caught in the many facets of a diamond.

Catherine Havisham is an isolated child, both precocious and insecure. When she is old enough, Catherine’s father sends her to an impoverished aristocratic family of his acquaintance to be ‘‘finished’’. There, Catherine finds herself cut off by the deep chasms of social class. By the time her education is complete, Catherine is at home nowhere. It is only the charming bounder, Compeyson, himself an outsider, who seems to offer her a place to belong.

Despite some fine writing, however, the novel moves slowly. But the greatest difficulty lies at the heart of the endeavour.

Frame seeks to recast Miss Havisham as a woman of flesh and blood, driven mad by heartbreak, but that is to miss the point of Dickens’ creation. By making a real person of her, Frame is obliged not only to scale her down to human size but to explain all the awkward logistical quibbles that Dickens overlooked. In so doing, Frame diminishes her majestic inhumanity and her terrible pathos.