Tonight, we’ll read an excerpt from “Great Expectations” that features the iconic character “Miss Havisham.”

A wealthy spinster, once jilted at the altar, who insists on wearing her wedding dress for the rest of her life, she is one of Dickens’s most Gothic characters. Miss Havisham lives in a ruined mansion with her adopted daughter, Estella. Dickens describes her as looking like "the witch of the place".

Although she has often been portrayed in film versions as elderly, Dickens's own notes indicate that she is not quite 40 years old at the start of the novel, and that her reclusive lifestyle without sunlight aged her.