28. Pip, the protagonist of Charles Dickens' "Great Expectations", falls in love at first sight with a beautiful, cold-hearted girl named Estella, who keeps rejecting him. Does he eventually succeed in winning her love?
From Quiz How You Get the Girl
Answer:
maybe - the ending is left open
Raised by the sinister Miss Havisham, who taught her to despise all men as a form of revenge for having been jilted on her wedding day, Estella claims to have no heart. Throughout the novel, however, the reader suspects she harbours some feelings for Pip, because she does not toy with him as she does with other men. She eventually marries the brutish Bentley Drummle, who mistreats her. When Estella and Pip meet again eleven years later, shortly after her husband's death in a riding accident, she asks him to forgive her. He takes her hand, and - though they mention friendship rather than love - knows they will never be parted again. In the original ending, Dickens had Pip and Estella meet in London when she had already remarried. The author rewrote it after Edward Bulwer-Lytton (the author of "The Last Days of Pompeii") commented that the ending was too sad.