Recently, I got a nice collection of porcelain dolls made after famous female literary characters (some of you have already met my Madame Bovary) and among them there was Estella from Great Expectations, my favourite novel by Charles Dickens. Who is Estella? Estella is a little heartless bitch that was raised to break men’s hearts – in this case Pip’s. Did she succeed to do so? Most definitely.
Dickens wrote two endings for this novel; the original one in which Pip who remains single, briefly sees Estella in London who has remarried after becoming a widow, and the revised one (Dickens yielded to a friend’s persuasion to make a new, more upbeat ending) in which Pip visits Miss Havisham’s house once more to find Estella walking the grounds, being all single, beautiful, and sad about having thrown Pip’s love away. There is a suggestion that they might finally end up together.
If you have read the novel, you have probably read the one with the revised more promising ending.
I personally think that Dickens should have stuck with his original plot, but I allow that people need to see happy endings.
“The unqualified truth is, that when I loved Estella with the love of a man, I loved her simply because I found her irresistible. Once for all; I knew to my sorrow, often and often, if not always, that I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be. Once for all; I love her none the less because I knew it, and it had no more influence in restraining me, than if I had devoutly believed her to be human perfection.”
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Lost in Translation 
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