Eliza Emily Donnithorne (8 July 1821 – 20 May 1886) was an Australian woman best known as a possible inspiration for the character of

Miss Havisham Miss Havisham is a character in Charles Dickens's 1861 novel ''Great Expectations''. She is a wealthy spinster, once jilted at the altar, who insists on wearing her wedding dress for the rest of her life. She lives in a ruined mansion with her ...

Charles Dickens Charles John Huffam Dickens (; 7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was an English novelist, journalist, short story writer and Social criticism, social critic. He created some of literature's best-known fictional characters, and is regarded by ...

' 1861 novel ''

Great Expectations ''Great Expectations'' is the thirteenth novel by English author Charles Dickens and his penultimate completed novel. The novel is a bildungsroman and depicts the education of an orphan nicknamed Pip. It is Dickens' second novel, after ''Dav ...

''.

Biography

Early life

Eliza Donnithorne was born at the

Cape of Good Hope The Cape of Good Hope ( ) is a rocky headland on the Atlantic Ocean, Atlantic coast of the Cape Peninsula in South Africa. A List of common misconceptions#Geography, common misconception is that the Cape of Good Hope is the southern tip of Afri ...

, South Africa, and spent her early childhood in

Calcutta Kolkata, also known as Calcutta (List of renamed places in India#West Bengal, its official name until 2001), is the capital and largest city of the Indian States and union territories of India, state of West Bengal. It lies on the eastern ba ...

where her father, James Donnithorne, worked for the

East India Company The East India Company (EIC) was an English, and later British, joint-stock company that was founded in 1600 and dissolved in 1874. It was formed to Indian Ocean trade, trade in the Indian Ocean region, initially with the East Indies (South A ...

as master of the mint and later as a judge. Her mother was Sarah Elizabeth Donnithorne, nee Bampton. Sarah Donnithorne and the couple's two older daughters died during a

cholera Cholera () is an infection of the small intestine by some Strain (biology), strains of the Bacteria, bacterium ''Vibrio cholerae''. Symptoms may range from none, to mild, to severe. The classic symptom is large amounts of watery diarrhea last ...

epidemic in the 1830s. In 1838, when Eliza was about 17 years old, her father retired and moved to

Sydney Sydney is the capital city of the States and territories of Australia, state of New South Wales and the List of cities in Australia by population, most populous city in Australia. Located on Australia's east coast, the metropolis surrounds Syd ...

. Eliza seems to have lived in England for some years with her brother and his wife, before joining her father in New South Wales in 1846. In Sydney they lived at Cambridge Hall (later known as Camperdown Lodge) at 36

King Street, Newtown King Street is the central thoroughfare of the suburb of Newtown, New South Wales, Newtown in Sydney, Australia. The residents of the area, including a higher-than-average concentration of students, LGBT people and artists, are most visible on ...

. When her father died in May 1852, Eliza inherited most of his estate.

Broken engagement and later life

Although there are multiple versions of the story and historical evidence is scarce, most accounts of Donnithorne's life focus on a broken engagement when she was about 30 years old. Some sources name her fiancé as George Cuthbertson, a clerk with a shipping company. On the morning of the wedding, her fiancé did not arrive at Cambridge Hall for the wedding breakfast. The story goes that she ordered that the feast and decorations be left out, and spent the rest of her life as a recluse. Some versions say that she never took off her wedding dress. A 1946 retelling captures the recurring details of the story:

The guests were assembled, and the wedding breakfast prepared. Eliza, clad in her bridal gown, awaited the arrival of the groom. He never came. She never heard from him again. When the guests had departed, Eliza pulled down the blinds of her house, and for 30 years remained a hermit. The front door was chained pemitting it to open only a few inches; callers never saw her, for when she was forced to speak to them, she remained out of sight. Here, for those long years, lived a woman in whom hope had died. When death at last came to Eliza, those who came to carry her to the greater peace of Camperdown Cemetery found her still clad in her bridal gown. Dust lay thick on the floor, and the window panes were thick with grime. And in the dining room, the wedding feast was uneaten, and the food had mouldered into dust.

Death and legacy

Donnithorne died in 1886 and was buried at St Stephen's Church in Newtown (now

Camperdown Cemetery Camperdown Cemetery is an historic cemetery located on Church Street in Newtown, New South Wales, Newtown, an inner-city suburb of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. The cemetery was founded in 1848 and was for twenty years the main general ceme ...

) alongside her father. Her grave remains one of the cemetery's most visited by tourists. When it was vandalised in 2004, the Australian National Trust and the UK Dickens Society contributed to the cost of its restoration.

As inspiration for Miss Havisham

The claim that Eliza Donnithorne inspired the character of

in ''

'' has been part of Australian literary lore since at least the last decades of the 19th century. Charles Dickens never visited Australia, but he was interested in the Australian colonies and wrote frequently about them in his weekly journal, ''

Household Words ''Household Words'' was an English weekly magazine edited by Charles Dickens in the 1850s. It took its name from the line in Shakespeare's '' Henry V'': "Familiar in his mouth as household words." History During the planning stages, titles orig ...

''. There are several theories as to how he may have encountered the story of Eliza Donnithorne. One 1935 newspaper report describes Donnithorne's father, James, as "a great friend of the famous writer", but offers no source for this statement. Another theory suggests that the Sydney-based social reformer

Caroline Chisholm Caroline Chisholm ( ; born Caroline Jones; 30 May 1808 – 25 March 1877) was an English humanitarian known mostly for her support of immigrant female and family welfare in Australia. She is commemorated on 16 May in the Calendar of saints (Ch ...

, who met Dickens in England in 1850 and corresponded with him about the Australian colonies, may have told Dickens about Donnithorne. Chisholm's descriptions of life in

New South Wales New South Wales (commonly abbreviated as NSW) is a States and territories of Australia, state on the Eastern states of Australia, east coast of :Australia. It borders Queensland to the north, Victoria (state), Victoria to the south, and South ...

were published in Dickens' ''Household Words'', and the character of Mrs Jellyby in Dickens' ''

Bleak House ''Bleak House'' is a novel by English author Charles Dickens, first published as a 20-episode Serial (literature), serial between 12 March 1852 and 12 September 1853. The novel has many characters and several subplots, and is told partly by th ...

'' was likely based in part on Chisholm. Chisholm would have had opportunity to hear about Donnithorne: she ran a school for girls in Newtown, near Donnithorne's home; Chisholm and her husband were part of the same small Sydney philanthropic circle as Donnithorne's father; and Chisholm and Eliza Donnithorne were at one point treated by the same Sydney doctor. Some versions of the story speculate that Dickens' sons, two of whom spent time in Australia, told the story to their father. However, they arrived in Australia after ''Great Expectations'' was published. Other historians propose an alternative explanation: that Dickens did not base Miss Havisham on Donnithorne, but that Sydney readers drew the connection when ''Great Expectations'' was published in 1861, and over time embellished Donnithorne's story with details borrowed from Dickens' book. This is the tentative conclusion reached by Evelyn Juers in her 2012 book ''The Recluse'', the most thorough recent investigation of the story.

In popular culture and the arts

Opera: ''Miss Donnithorne's Maggot'' is a 1974 operatic work, with music by

Peter Maxwell Davies Sir Peter Maxwell Davies (8 September 1934 – 14 March 2016) was an English composer and conductor, who in 2004 was made Master of the Queen's Music. As a student at both the University of Manchester and the Royal Manchester College of Music ...

and text by

Randolph Stow Julian Randolph Stow (28 November 1935 – 29 May 2010) was an Australian-born writer, novelist and poet. Early life Born in Geraldton, Western Australia, Randolph Stow was the son of Mary Campbell Stow née Sewell and Cedric Ernest Stow, a ...

. Literature: Eliza Donnithorne features in the 1987 children's novel ''I Am Susannah'' by Libby Gleeson (Angus & Robertson).

Bibliography

*Juers, Evelyn. ''The Recluse''. Sydney: Giramondo, 2012. *Ryan, J.S. ‘A Possible Australian Source for Miss Havisham’, ''Australian Literary Studies'', vol 1, no 2, Dec 1963, pp 134–36. *Wardrope, Alan. ''Lost Expectations: The Story of the Real Miss Havisham''. Chatswood, NSW: New Holland, 2011.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Donnithorne, Eliza Emily People from New South Wales Cape Colony people People from Sydney 1821 births 1886 deaths Women hermits 19th-century Australian women