The structure of the preoedipal space where siblings’ emerging sexual relationships are encouraged by a maternal tyrant which Andrews writes in Flowers in the Attic can be traced back to Dickens’ Great Expectations (1860–61), where Pip and Estella’s coded incest is presided over by the bitter and sadistic spinster Miss Havisham. This is echoed in Flowers through Cathy and Chris’ sexual relationship triggered by their incarceration at the hands of their mother and grandmother, and is explicitly signalled towards in the third novel in the series If There be Thorns (1981), where the children’s disguised mother Corrine moves next door to the adult Cathy and corrupts her son Bart. A ‘rich, rich woman who could afford anything!’ (33), Corrine wears a funereal black veil revealing only her blue eyes and evoking Miss Havisham’s decayed wedding dress and beguiles Bart ‘like I was the pin and she was the magnet’ (49), transforming him into a ‘changeling child’ (86) through the lure of her gaze. In the Prologue of Flowers the adult Cathy invokes ‘genius’ Dickens’ Bildungsromans as a model for her writing, covertly endorsing her own visceral and violent confession ‘put down with tears, with bitter blood, with sour gall, well mixed and blended with shame and guilt’ (3) by association. Dickens was a favourite author of the teenage Andrews, and Andrews/Cathy exploit the canonical status of Dickens’ work to sanction their own incest narrative, and although trite and cloying her depictions of incest and maternal abuse undoubtedly find a precedent in the themes of Great Expectations.