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Summary
Summary
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 brewhouse 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.
A Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction Book of 2013
Author Notes
Ronald Frame was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and educated there and at Oxford University. His novel The Lantern Bearers was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, named the Scottish Book of the Year, and cited by the American Library Association. He is also a dramatist and winner of the Samuel Beckett Award. Many of his original radio plays have been broadcast by the BBC. He lives outside Glasgow.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This stylish but dour "prelude" to Charles Dickens's classic Great Expectations comes from Glaswegian dramatist and author Frame (The Lantern Bearers). Catherine Havisham grows up in privilege and leisure at the imposing Satis House, courtesy of her affluent father, Joseph, who runs the most prosperous brewery in North Kent and ships her off to the aristocratic Chadwyck family to polish her social graces. Joseph, a widower, sparks his teenage daughter's resentment by disclosing he has remarried, though his second wife has since died, and Catherine also comes to loathe her ne'er-do-well half-brother, Arthur, after he begins living with them. She falls in love with the dashing racetrack gambler Charles Compeyson, and Joseph dies, leaving her the brewery. She becomes engaged to Charles, who wants to manage the Havisham brewery. However, Charles jilts his would-be bride, and Catherine's life descends into seclusion and a slow madness; she wears only her wedding dress while living in the decaying mansion. After adopting a young girl, Estella, Catherine ages into the cynical spinster depicted in Great Expectations. Frame offers a convincing recreation of the iconic Dickens character, but his tale suffers from centering on such an unappealing protagonist. Agent: Adrian Searle, Freight Books. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Frame (The Lantern Bearers, 2001, etc.) writes the story of Catherine Havisham, recluse of Satis House, in this prelude to Charles Dickens' Great Expectations. Despite her mother's death in childbirth, the Great Expectations of Miss Havisham come naturally. Her father, owner of a prosperous brewery, spoils her beyond measure. Then, as Catherine matures, he dispatches her to Durley Chase, home of Lady Chadwyck and her children Isabella, William, Marianna and cousin Frederick. The Chadwycks are to add the social polish necessary for Catherine to marry well. There, Catherine has eyes for William but soon learns that titled folk do not marry merchants' daughters. She then meets Charles Compeyson, charming, enigmatic, vaguely roguish. Class prejudices aside, the Chadwycks attempt to dissuade Catherine from Compeyson, but she is enthralled, even ignoring Chadwyck cousin Frederick, thinking him overly religious, awkward and unambitious despite his shy admiration for her. Then her father dies. Catherine allows Compeyson to run the brewery. He soon proposes then leaves her at the altar. Frame's chapters are short, written from Catherine's point of view, and laced with elements of classical poetry and song. Aeneas, Tom O'Bedlam and Henry Purcell deepen a narrative appealing to the modern ear yet suitably Dickensian. Subplots follow Sally, a village girl who becomes Catherine's childhood companion, and Arthur, Catherine's wastrel half brother. The book ripples with social commentary, an example being Catherine's attempt to manage the brewery only to be stymied by gender prejudice and her own obstinacy. Finally, she closes the brewery. Catherine then adopts Estella, intending revenge on the masculine world--"all of the genus who conceitedly, smugly supposed that they were indispensable to a woman's personal completeness, her felicity." Minor characters, Pip included, strengthen the story, and Frame's presentation of the era is substantial but not overdone. Young Catherine's character earns little empathy, and any sympathy for the recluse of Satis House certain that "true life is too awesome and terrifying to bear" can only be conjured up as her death looms. An intelligently imagined Dickens prequel.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
ronald frame's fast-moving new novel makes use of the eccentric Miss Havisham from "Great Expectations," but the first two-thirds of it is much more Trollopian than Dickensian. Right from the start, Catherine Havisham suggests she was born into a world she might never understand: "I killed my mother." That she was a breech birth, that the death of women in childbirth was a given in early 19th-century England, are simply facts. What is important is that the machine of her life is already operating full tilt, and the most she can do is keep her eyes open and attempt to understand its workings. Catherine Havisham's father is a prosperous brewer; the brewery is on the same property as the family residence. Though her father seems to be honest, he is secretive. Is this because she is young? Because she is female? Because he wants to use his wealth to lift her into the upper classes? She understands that the brewery is dangerous as well as noisy. She is not allowed to go there (a cart horse sometimes runs off, "endangering itself and anyone in its path"), and every day, for 17 hours, the place is filled with "heat, flames, steam, the dust clouds from the hops, the heady atmosphere of fermentation and money being made." Inside the house, although Catherine is showered with material indulgences, there are other mysteries. Mrs. Bundy, the cook, doesn't behave like a servant, and when Catherine meets Mrs. Bundy's son, Arthur, he is more than rude, implying a relationship to Catherine that she doesn't understand. (Although the reader soon does.) Part of the allure of the early chapters of "Havisham" is that the reader is a step ahead of Catherine in comprehending the plots, both benign and malign, she is facing. What is reminiscent of Trollope is the persistent ambivalence of Frame's characters, their troubled negotiations of the boundaries set by class and money. Like Trollope's characters, Catherine and her relatives and associates have good intentions, but they can't resist yielding to circumstances or giving in to temptation. As a result (unlike Dickens's characters) the virtuous aren't readily distinguishable from the vicious. Catherine (Dickens's wife was named Catherine; in "Great Expectations," Miss Havisham's given name remains a mystery) is intelligent, presentable, a good candidate for marriage into the propertied classes, but she needs finishing, and so she is sent off to Surrey, to the Chadwycks - a landed widow, her three children and their male cousin. Catherine is a little behind the two young men and two young women she lives and studies with. She can't, for example, at first translate the "Aeneid" on her own. But the brilliant Chadwyck cousin, Frederick, nicknamed Moses, helps her. She enjoys her studies and blossoms intellectually. She is especially taken with Dido, the lovelorn queen Aeneas leaves behind. She also excels at tableaux vivants and masquerades. (It's worth noting that Dickens had a stage built in one of his houses and loved putting on amateur theatricals.) Her starring performance is as Mary, Queen of Scots, waiting to be executed, her head on the block. It's clear to the reader, and perhaps suspected by Catherine, that she is to be matched with William, Lady Chadwyck's son, and she grows fond enough of him. But William is a rake; he considers her, then moves on. However, her active social life brings her into contact with someone not unlike herself, an intruder into polite society, more direct and bold than the Chadwycks, a young man named Charles Compeyson. Now Frame's readers know just where we are headed, since Compeyson is almost as unforgettable a name as Magwitch, Pip or Havisham. But Frame pretends that Catherine has choices, and some of his best scenes concern her confrontations, as a typical Victorian female, with the male-dominated society around her. Her father poses her first difficulty - he makes arrangements behind her back that affect her, then springs them on her and expects her to obey even though she only half understands what's going on. He suffers from tuberculosis and then dies, leaving her to run the brewery when she is still young and single. Her biggest problem as a businesswoman isn't that she doesn't know what she's doing but that she can't gain the respect of the men she must employ - or their wives or the publicans who buy the beer. These scenes offer views of 19th-century English life that go beyond hindsight and give observations by Dickens and his distinguished peers a welcome context. Frame is more successful at augmenting Catherine's back story than at fitting her into the world of "Great Expectations." By the time she summons Pip to Satis House, the narrative pace has sped up to include not only her famous jilting but also the years of mental disturbance that follow and the adoption of Estella as a plan for revenge on the world of men. Perhaps Frame couldn't decide how much of Dickens's plot to include in his own, how much he could trust the reader to know without being told. It's here that the inherent predicament of this novel - of writing not a version of an earlier great work but an addendum to an earlier great work - kicks in. Catherine is believable and sympathetic as a young woman, but as the Miss Havisham of "Great Expectations," she must be limited to the contours of the figure Dickens constructed - strange, exaggerated, symbolic. Like most of Dickens's secondary characters, she can't evolve or learn from her experience the way, say, Miss Jemima Stanbury does in Trollope's "He Knew He Was Right." Frame attempts to give Miss Havisham enough of an inner life so she can behave as she must in "Great Expectations," but that inner life needs to work itself out through the years of Estella and Pip's youth. Once she's stuck in time, as a character in a novel and not as a character in a movie (Jean Simmons, Charlotte Rampling and Helena Bonham Carter are only three of the many actresses who have embodied her idiosyncrasies), Frame doesn't have enough to work with to retain our interest. The characters Catherine loves - her childhood friend Sally, Charles Compeyson, even her father and the thoughtful Moses Chadwyck - are merely sketched in. Pip jumps off the page, but maybe only because we have met him before. Frame's portrayal of Catherine supports a diagnosis of narcissism in the original Miss Havisham, but it makes a novel about her monotonous. His young Catherine is observant, eager to form intimacies in spite of the ephemeral nature of the relationships she is afforded by her father's ambitions and her own isolation. The reader can only recognize that this Catherine Havisham deserves more than either Dickens or Frame allows her. JANE SMILEY'S most recent novel for adults is "Private Life." Her most recent novel for young adults is "Gee Whiz."
Library Journal Review
In his latest novel, Frame (The Lantern Bearers) tackles the backstory of a literary legend: Charles Dickens's reclusive, vengeful Miss Havisham.The daughter of a prosperous widowed brewer, young Catherine Havisham leads a sheltered life. Her father's wealth and social aspirations isolate her from the other children in the village, leaving her unable to connect emotionally with the scant peers nearby. As a teenager Catherine is sent to live with the Chadwyck family to gain sophistication and an education. Though trained to quote poetry and participate in fashionable tableaus, she remains unworldly and ill-prepared for the romantic advances of the notorious Mr. Compeyson. Verdict Short scenes and shifting grammatical tenses give the novel a dreamlike quality and make Catherine's narration all the more unreliable. By examining her psychological development, this prequel to Great Expectations reveals a Catherine Havisham who has always been naive about human nature, almost right up to her very end. While Frame is prone to telling rather than showing the gradual construction of Catherine's delicate psyche, readers will be eager to discover what led to that fateful wedding day when she was abandoned at the altar. [See Prepub Alert, 6/24/13.]-Liza Oldham, Beverly, MA (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
O NE * * * My father draped the public rooms of Satis House in dust sheets. The chandeliers were left in situ, but wrapped in calico bags. The shutters were closed completely across some windows, and part-drawn at others. My first days were lived out in a hush of respectfully lowered voices as a procession of folk came to offer their condolences. My eyes became accustomed to the half-light. * * * One evening several new candles were set in one of the chandeliers. My mother's clavecin was uncovered, and someone played it again - notwithstanding that it was out of tune - and that was the point at which the house stopped being a sepulchre and was slowly brought back to life. * * * It was the first word I remember seeing . HAVISHAM. Painted in green letters on the sooty brick of the brewhouse wall. Fat letters. Each one had its own character. Comfortable spreading 'H'. Angular, proud 'A'. Welcoming, open 'V'. The unforthcoming sentinel 'I'. 'S', a show-off, not altogether to be trusted. The squat and briefly indecisive, then reassuring 'M'. The name was up there even in the dark. In the morning it was the first thing I would look for from the house windows, to check that the wind hadn't made off with our identity in the night or the slanting estuary rain washed the brickwork clean. * * * Jehosophat Havisham, otherwise known as Joseph Havisham, son of Matthias. Havisham's was the largest of several brewers in the town. Over the years we had bought out a number of smaller breweries and their outlets, but my father had preferred to concentrate production in our own (extended) works. He continued his father's programme of tying in the vending sites, acquiring ownership outright or making loans to the publicans who stocked our beer. Everyone in North Kent knew who we were. Approaching the town on the London road, the eye was drawn first to the tower of the cathedral and then, some moments later, to the name HAVISHAM so boldly stated on the old brick. We were to be found on Crow Lane. The brewery was on one side of the big cobbled yard, and our home on the other. Satis House was Elizabethan, and took the shape of an E, with later addings-on. The maids would play a game, counting in their heads the rooms they had to clean, and never agreeing on a total: between twenty-five and thirty. Once the famous Pepys had strolled by, and ventured into the Cherry Garden. There he came upon a doltish shopkeeper and his pretty daughter, and the great man 'did kiss her'. My father slept in the King's Room, which was the chamber provided for Charles II following his sojourn in France, in 1660. The staircase had been made broader to accommodate the Merry Monarch as his manservants manoeuvred him upstairs and down. A second, steeper flight was built behind for the servants. * * * I grew up with the rich aroma of hops and the potent fumes from the fermenting rooms in my nostrils, filling my head until I failed to notice. I must have been in a state of perpetual mild intoxication. I heard, but came not to hear, the din of the place. Casks being rolled across the cobbles, chaff-cutting, bottle-washing, racking, wood being tossed into the kiln fires. Carts rumbled in and out all day long. The labourers had Herculean muscles. Unloading the sacks of malt and raising them on creaky pulleys; mashing the ground malt; slopping out the containers and vats; drawing into butts; pounding the extraneous yeast; always rolling those barrels from the brewhouse to the storehouse, and loading them on to the drays. Heat, flames, steam, the dust clouds from the hops, the heady atmosphere of fermentation and money being made. * * * I was told by my father that the brewery was a parlous place for a little girl, and I should keep my distance. The hoists, the traps, those carts passing in and out; the horses were chosen for their strength, not their sensitivity, but every now and then one would be overcome with equine despair and make a bid for freedom, endangering itself and anyone in its path. The brewhouse was only silent at night, and even then I heard the watchmen whistling to keep up their spirits in that gaunt and eerily echoing edifice, and the dogs for want of adventure barking at phantom intruders. The first brew-hands were there by five in the morning, sun-up, and the last left seventeen hours later, a couple of hours short of midnight. I woke, and fell asleep, to the clopping of shod hooves, the whinnying of overworked carthorses. * * * 'It's a dangerous place, miss,' my nursemaids would repeat. My father insisted. 'Too many hazards for you to go running about.' But should I ever complain about the noise, or the smell of hops or dropped dung, his response was immediate: this was our livelihood/if it was good enough for my grandfather/you'll simply have to put up with it, won't you, missy. So I learned not to comment, and if I was distracted from my lessons or my handiwork or my day-dreaming, I moved across to the garden side of the house. Out of doors, in the garden, the sounds would follow me, but there were flowers and trees to look at, and the wide Medway sky to traverse with my thoughts. * * * Sometimes I would see a man or a woman reeling drunk out of a pub, or I'd hear the singing and cursing of regulars deep in their cups. That, too, was a part of who we Havishams were. But I would be hurried past by whoever was holding my hand, as if they had been issued with orders: the child isn't to linger thereabouts, d'you understand. So we negotiated those obstacles double-quick, taking to side alleys if need be, to remove ourselves to somewhere more salubrious, while the rollicking voices sounded after us - but not their owners, thankfully grounded in a stupor. Copyright © 2012 by Ronald Frame Excerpted from Havisham: A Novel by Ronald Frame All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.