Right now we have a display of titles at EPL that I’ve dubbed “Retold and Revisited: Classic Tales from Another Point of View.” The re-telling device has always been a popular way to look at a well known story and give it a fresh treatment as in Longbourn, the Pride and Prejudice story told by a serving maid, or as in The Innocents, which takes Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence and sets it in contemporary London’s upscale Jewish enclave. I’m currently reading a new release that explores the back story of one of literature’s most enigmatic characters–Miss Havisham, the decrepit, jilted bride from Dickens’s Great Expectations. Ronald Frame’s Havisham is told from Catherine’s own mouth (yes, Frame gives her a first name), and its rich, fleshed-out plot of how we get from a wealthy, young woman in love to that scene when Pip enters Miss Havisham’s ghastly dining room settles many readers’ questions and theories.
For more insight, listen to this interview from last Saturday’s Weekend Edition program with author Ronald Frame and host Linda Wertheimer.
Barbara L.