Estella is cold, cruel, beautiful, and deeply untrustworthy. The daughter of Magwitch the convict, she is taken in by Miss Havisham from the age of three and taught to hate and mistreat men of all kinds, Pip among them. The reader sees her through the eyes of Pip, who falls in love with her and never quite separates her attractiveness from her social superiority and poise. Estella varies in her attitude to Pip, sometimes seeming friendly in a guarded way, but always able to distance herself again at a moment’s notice. The more Pip loves her, the more Estella seems to enjoy torturing and manipulating him. She is from even lower stock in the class system than he is, and one might think she resents his intrusion into the life she has found among the wealthy.

We get a sense that Estella struggles against the cruelty and shame she is made to endure; as she and Pip get older, she continually tells him she has no heart to spare his feelings and keep him from being as dependent on her as she has been on the heartless Miss Havisham. In so doing, Estella proves that she does have a heart, albeit a damaged one. Her marriage to Drummle prolongs her own agony, but near the end of the novel she learns the same lesson as Pip: feelings can’t be suppressed enough to prevent us from feeling, and holding emotions back cripples us, as evidenced by Miss Havisham and Magwitch, among others.

Although Estella is an unlikeable character to anyone not infatuated with her, she is best understood as an abused child, one who has been cynically manipulated by Miss Havisham to remove all kindness and natural feeling from her nature, leaving her permanently unhappy and probably incapable of bringing happiness to anyone else. At the novel’s end, Estella experiences her own kind of evolution, bent into what she hopes is a better shape that will allow her to undo some of the damage she has caused. Estella’s gradual change over the course of the novel has caused some critics to call her Dickens’ first truly developed female character.