This has got to be the most verbose and disgusting tale of misogyny in the English language. If there's anything worse, I don't want to know about it.

We have poor little Pip, who is "in love" with Estella just by looking at her, because she's pretty. So he spends the entire rest of the book feeling entitled to her. She never leads him on. She's never even nice to him. So of course she is breaking his heart.

And it's all Miss Havisham's fault that he's obsessed with her and that the feelings are not mutual - because Miss Havisham raised her to be aloof. Apparently if she were raised different, then when Pip fell in love with her by looking at her, she would've been appreciative, and grown up to be his obedient wife.

Reading this, and realizing it's been popular for over a hundred years, I wonder just what the fuck is WRONG with people?

Then I read that this story was based on Dickens' life. He was shunned by some girl, and never got over it. He had no idea what love meant, and how it was different from obsession. He went on to leave his wife after she gave him 10 children, and have an affair with a teenage girl. Thank goodness his lust was reciprocated by that girl child, or we'd have yet another autobiographical novel about a friend-zoning wench.

n  "All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up."n

In Brief:

Probably Dickens' most critically-acclaimed novel, Great Expectations is the bildungsroman of the orphan Philip Pirrip, known as Pip, who is also the novel's narrator. As a boy, he unwittingly aids the escaped convict Abel Magwitch in trying to make his getaway. Shortly thereafter, the elderly and uber-eccentric spinster Miss Havisham summons him to be the playmate of her adopted daughter, the exquisite but aloof Estella.

Pip comes into a fortune from an anonymous benefactor which permits him to obtain a genteel education and entry into a world of commerce. Pip assumes that Miss Havisham is the source of his great expectations.

Pip was unaware, though, that Miss Havisham harbors some deep-seated resentments toward all males arising from being jilted on her wedding day by her fiance' Compeyson, who turned out a fraud. She keeps her ruined mansion as it was on that fateful day, wearing her wedding dress all the time and looking "like the witch of the place." She raises Estella to break all men's hearts, including Pip's.

The novel is definitely Dickens' most Gothic work, with its dark mood, haunted by a graveyard, a fire, prison ships, poverty, and of course the most macabre of all Dickens' thousand plus characters by far, Miss Havisham, who must have inspired, at least in part, the haunting Norma Desmond from the Hollywood film "Sunset Boulevard."

I hated this book a lot less than every other Charles Dickens' book I was forced to read in school. I know he was paid by the word and that's why he goes on so. If I had my way I would like to appoint an editor for all these over-wordy books to turn them into something somewhat more readable. But that would be a bit like kicking a holy cow in the ribs, wouldn't it?