Miss Havisham’s Wedding

Miss Havisham’s Wedding Night is a fantasia on Dicken’s Great Expectations. Miss Havisham is a wealthy spinster, once jilted at the altar, who wears her wedding dress for the rest of her life. Dickens’s own notes indicate that she is only in her 30s – though in film she is often portrayed as elderly. The opera monologue gives the backstory to her tragic lonely existence, revealing a most unliberated woman who can’t “let go” of the betrayal.