femgenficathon

Author: a_t_rain
Fandom: Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (plus a bit of A Tale of Two Cities)
Rating: PG
Warnings: None
Prompt: Let us not fear the hidden. Or each other. – Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980), poet, political activist, reporter, playwright, translator, and president of the American branch of International PEN, a world-wide association of writers dedicated to freedom of expression and to opposing political censorship and speaking for writers who have been silenced, harassed, attacked, or killed for what they’ve written.
Summary: Estella searches for information about her parentage.
Author’s Notes: Estella’s story takes place in December, 1842, the latest plausible date for the last chapter of Great Expectations (the mentions of “old London Bridge” establish 1831 as the terminus ad quem for the novel’s climax).

I am greatly indebted to the maintainers of the Victorian Dictionary, an invaluable resource. Also to the National Museum of Australia, where I learned about convict tokens.

As will be evident, I have taken Dickens’s revised ending (in which it is implied that Estella and Pip have a romantic future together) as my canon. Despite the conventionally romantic closure, this ending grants Estella quite a bit more agency and independence than Dickens’s original version, in which she remarries “a Shropshire doctor” after Bentley Drummle’s death and evidently retains her own property without having to mount the “determined resistance” she mentions in the revised version.

I don’t really believe that Lucie Darnay ever had a sexual relationship with Sydney Carton, but I suspect her children must have wondered whether she did.

( Star, Part One )