In which novel does the character Miss Havisham appear?

Miss Havisham appears in Charles Dickens’s novel Great Expectations.

Miss Havisham is one of Dickens’s most recognizable gothic characters. She is a wealthy heiress who was abandoned by her fiancé, Compeyson, on her wedding day. After the betrayal, she stops the clocks in her decaying mansion and continues wearing her wedding dress, preserving the wedding feast as if time had frozen at the moment of her humiliation.

She adopts Estella and raises her to be emotionally cold, intending for Estella to break men’s hearts in revenge for her own suffering. The young narrator, Pip, becomes one of Miss Havisham’s intended victims when he falls deeply in love with Estella. Her influence shapes much of Pip’s emotional and moral development.

Although adaptations often portray Miss Havisham as an elderly woman, Dickens’s notes suggest she is only in her mid-thirties when the novel begins. Great Expectations was published in 1861, first as a serial and later as a novel.