One early critic of Dickens’s Great Expectations called the character “a foolish, senseless, fantastical, impossible humbug”; later, another critic wrote that “living types have already been pointed out that claim resemblance [to her].” Carrie Frye suggests that this “seems like a fitting jumping-off point for exploring how Miss Havisham came to be in the world: as a fantastical, impossible creature … clearly based on real-life people.”