Havisham

Other Points of View

Carol Ann Duffy loves to provide new points of view on old stories. Her collection The World's Wife features a bunch of dramatic monologues from the point of view of historical and fictional women. In "Anne Hathaway," she writes in the voice of Shakespeare's wife. In "Mrs. Darwin," she speaks of Darwin's theory of evolution from his wife's point of view. Duffy loves to get in the minds of women who have been neglected by history (literary and otherwise) and give them a chance to speak for themselves. "Havisham" is one of her first poems to do so, and we think that she's been pretty darn successful so far.