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Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, 1861
Pip is a boy raised by his sister and her husband Joe, a blacksmith, in the marsh country of Kent. As a child he is sent to play at a rich, strange house, and there he meets Estella.
She is a girl raised by a jilted old woman for one purpose, which is to break men’s hearts. She does it, and she starts with his.
She breaks it steadily, for years, and he loves her anyway. Then she marries a cruel, stupid man, and Pip tells her plainly it will ruin her.
He goes abroad to work. He stays away eleven years.
When he comes home, he walks one evening to where the old house stood. It has been pulled down, and only the garden wall and the bare ground are left.
Someone is walking there in the dusk. It is Estella.
She is free of the marriage now, and it did to her what he said it would. She has come back alone to say goodbye to the ground she grew up on.
She is not the girl who mocked him. She is older, she has been hurt, and then she speaks.
“But you said to me,” returned Estella, very earnestly, “‘God bless you, God forgive you!’ And if you could say that to me then, you will not hesitate to say that to me now—now, when suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but—I hope—into a better shape. Be as considerate and good to me as you were, and tell me we are friends.”
“We are friends,” said I, rising and bending over her, as she rose from the bench.
“And will continue friends apart,” said Estella.
I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so, the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw the shadow of no parting from her.
Into.
Do not skim past that word. She does not say she was bent and broken and that was the end of her.
She says she was bent and broken into something. Into a better shape.
And look at what sits right before it. “I hope,” fenced off on both sides, like a woman taking a breath she is not sure she is allowed to take.
Now listen to me. You have been told, mostly without words, that what happened to you used you up.
That the marriage, or the long years of nobody, or the decades of carrying everyone but yourself, have worn the shape off you. That a woman past a certain point is what is left over.
Estella was raised to be cold. She was hurt by the very thing she was trained for.
And the hurt did not finish her. It taught her to understand what his heart used to be.
She could not understand love at twenty. She understands it now, standing in a ruined garden with her hands empty.
The years were not a delay. They were the lesson.
And he is there. Eleven years, and he walks to the exact spot on the exact evening she does.
I am not promising you that somebody is walking toward you through a ruined garden. I am telling you that a man in 1861 wrote down that a broken woman could be better shaped than an unbroken girl.
Then he walked her out into the evening, and he saw the shadow of no parting from her. Dickens gives their walk the last line of the whole book.
We are told the opposite every day of our lives. That the young version is the real one, and everything after is decline.
Read it again. Bent and broken, into a better shape.
This book is free. Almost all of us have seen some film of it with a wedding dress and a stopped clock, and almost none of us stayed long enough to hear Estella say this.
Underneath it I wrote
I am not what is left over. I am what it made.
Today. Copy Estella’s sentence about being bent and broken, by hand, slowly, with the dashes exactly where she put them. Underneath it, write one line about something you understand now that you could not have understood at twenty-five. One line, in your own hand. Nobody has to see it.
What I wrote that year
In March of the year I could not write, I copied a sentence of Cranford I had already copied once before. I could not think of a new one.
Underneath it I wrote the date, and one word. “Again.”
I thought I meant that I was repeating myself. I see now I meant that I had come back.
It is the smallest entry in thirty years of pages. I still think it is the truest.
