"Havisham" appears in Carol Ann Duffy's fourth collection of poems, Mean Time, published in 1993. Havisham is written from the perspective of the character Miss Havisham from Charles Dickens' novel Great Expectations. The poems included in Mean Time are best characterized as personal and painful; Duffy includes poems that use the same methods of ventriloquism made famous by her later collection The World's Wife, as well as poems written from her own perspective, but they all share the sense of loss, the fear of loss, and the need for comfort in dark times.
The speaker of "Havisham" is virtually beyond comfort. She represents a certain hopelessness, though a fictional one. Readers of Great Expectations will remember that her character sets her wedding dress on fire, and though Pip saves her, she eventually dies from her injuries while expressing remorse for the way she manipulated Pip and Estella. By taking on this character's narrative, Duffy tackles the kind of despair that finds no respite nor resolution.
