Home > Great Expectations Summary & Study Guide > Great Expectations Group > Question and Answer

Question:

Answers:

1. 
   lit24 Teacher
   Doctorate

   In the last chapter of the novel (Ch.59), Pip visits Satis House for the last time "for Estella's sake." It is then that he tells us what he has heard about Estella and her unhappy marriage to Bentley Drummle and about his untimely death:

   "I had heard of her as leading a most unhappy life, and as being separated from her husband, who had used her with great cruelty, and who had become quite renowned as a compound of pride, avarice, brutality, and meanness.  And I had heard of the death of her husband, from an accident consequent on his ill-treatment of a horse. This release had befallen her some two years before; for anything I knew, she was married again."

   And when he is there coincidentally Estella also arrives on the scene and the novel ends with both of them parting as friends:

   " 'We are friends,' said I rising and bending over her, as she rose from the bench.

   'And will continue friends apart,' said Estella."

   Sources:

   http://www.enotes.com/expectations/characters

   http://www.enotes.com/expectations/essays-criticism

   http://www.enotes.com/expectations/themes

   Rate answer:

   • Flag as inappropriate

   Posted by lit24 on Friday April 24, 2009 at 9:26 AM