Estella

Taken from her mother at the age of three, Estella grows up in the decaying house of Miss Havisham, a wealthy and eccentric woman who raises her to become a heartbreaker. Life at Satis House is gloomy and stifling, and the lessons Estella receives are full of contradictions. Small comforts come from the household cook's kindness and from the nearby marshes, which she loves. Estella is made to play with Pip, a boy from a poor village family. She wins his affection and wounds him, just as Miss Havisham intends. Years later, Estella comes back from schooling in France as a young woman and is pushed into London high society. There she meets Pip again. He now has money from an anonymous patron. Miss Havisham asks Pip to help find Estella a husband, and the plan leaves Estella deeply troubled. Estella has long been a pawn in other people's schemes, trapped in patterns her adoptive mother started. She is beautiful, strong-willed and hard to read. Can she escape the limits set by society and by her own past? Can she finally tell her own story, in her own words? This feminist reimagining of Dickens's Great Expectations gives the reader Estella's perspective and changes the ending. It explores a character that readers of the original have rarely looked at closely.