· 1861 · Victorian
Miss Havisham
A woman in Great Expectations who is left jilted at the altar, stops eating, ages, and arranges to be found the way she was on her wedding day - decades later, in a wedding dress, in a darkened room.
The most complete fictional treatment of the object of a parasocial bond being a person who was never real, and of the grief outliving the reasons for it. She is not a metaphor for a fictional character, she is a person who has mistaken her own wedding for a plot.
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