What happens to Miss Havisham?

Miss Havisham is badly burned when her wedding dress catches fire at Satis House; she later dies of the injuries. The fire is not random spectacle. It consumes the costume she has worn as a lifelong monument to betrayal, and it arrives after Pip has forced her to see what her pedagogy did to Estella and to him.

Dickens allows her a late plea for forgiveness without turning the novel into a conversion tract. Pip’s pity matters because he has finally stopped needing her as a fantasy benefactor. The question is useful when readers want the “plot spoiler”; the concept of instrumental love is the longer frame — her death does not undo Estella’s training or Pip’s years of misread expectation.