Pip’s major love interest through the story is Estella. When we first meet Estella at Miss Havisham’s she is at once very beautiful and also very cruel to our hero. Pip is smitten by Estella’s loveliness but, until the end of the novel, his love for her is largely unrequited. Pip suffers much anguish throughout the story because of this love interest since his persistence toward Estella never really gets rewarded until the last pages of the novel.Estella is a major character in Great Expectations whose importance in the novel far outweighs her appearances to the reader. Dickens effectively weaves Estella into the story through a series of cameo experiences which, for the most part, play on Pip’s mind and evoke sympathy toward him by the reader. Each time we meet Estella she will say something to Pip or perform some act of discourtesy that will send shivers up our spine and cause us to caution Pip mentally to leave her alone and to try to forget her. When we learn that Estella’s attitude is really the result of her tutelage by Miss Havisham, we may, at best, have mixed feelings about the girl. Dickens does such a superb job at painting Estella’s portrait early on in the novel that it becomes difficult for us to really have strong feelings of affection toward her. Any sympathy or sense of attraction we may feel for Estella is primarily out of respect for Pip.Estella as a love interest in Great Expectations certainly is a matter of importance throughout the story, but Dickens uses her character in other ways to effectively spin his tale. First, Estella in the Havisham household and her attitude toward men nurtured by the jilted matriarch who is so central to the novel completes Dickens’ characterization of the elderly would-be bride as a symbol of antifamily. It is credit to the genius of Dickens that in a novel where plot depends on bloodlines and familial relationships, a central character like ...
