I had heard of her as leading a most unhappy life, and as being separated from her husband, who had used her with great cruelty, and who had become quite renowned as a compound of pride, avarice, brutality, and meanness. And I had heard of the death of her husband, from an accident consequent on his ill-treatment of a horse. This release had befallen her some two years before; for anything I knew, she was married again.
– Charles Dickens
Great Expectations, Chapter 59. We learn how Estella suffered from marrying the cruel Bentley Drummle. She became the victim of an abusive husband, who met his demise in an accident with a horse he also ill-treated.