Often cited as Dickens’ initially persuading female character, Estella is a remarkably unexpected creation, one who darkly undermines the idea of romantic love and serves as an intense feedback against the class framework in which she is soiled. From the age of three she was raised by Miss Havisham, Estella wins Pip’s deepest love by practicing deliberate cruelty. Though she represents Pip’s first longed-for ideal of life among the upper classes, Estella is actually even lower-born than Pip; as Pip learns near the end of the novel, she is the daughter of Magwitch, the coarse convict, and thus springs from the very lowest level of society.
Ironically, life among the upper classes does not speak to salvation for Estella. Instead, she is misled twice by her adopted class. Rather than being raised by Magwitch, a man of awesome internal respectability, she is raised by Miss Havisham, who destroys her ability to express emotion and interact normally with the world. And rather than marrying the kindhearted commoner Pip, Estella marries the cruel nobleman Drummle, who treats her cruelly and makes her life hopeless for many years.
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Finally, Estella’s long, agonizing marriage to Drummle make her create similarly as Pip—that is, she learns, through experience, to depend on and believe her internal emotions. In the last scene of the novel, she has turned into her own particular lady without precedent for the book. As she says to Pip, “Enduring has been more grounded than all other educating. . . . I have been twisted and broken, yet—I trust—into a better