Estelle

Estelle is a female given name of Occitan origin, and means star. Saint Estelle was a martyr who purportedly lived in Aquitania in the third century AD, although the earliest references to her date from the Middle Ages. The earliest formats of this Saint's name, Eustella/Eustelle and Eustalia, morphed into Estelle by Provençal poet Frédéric Mistral due to association with Estela (Occitan for star, of which Estelle is essentially a phonetic rendering in French). Saint Estelle is the patron saint of the Felibrige, a literary and cultural association founded by Mistral and other Provençal writers to defend and promote their language. Star is the meaning generally assigned the name Estelle, although the format Eustalia suggests the name's true root is the Greek eustales: well-groomed. Despite the reported popularity of the saint the name Estelle was afforded little evident usage prior to the publication in 1788 of the pastoral Estelle by Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian, the first famous historical namesake, Estelle Fornier (née Dubœuf), muse of the composer Berlioz, who was born in 1797. Best-known overall in France due to model Estelle Lefébure (born 1966), the name Estelle has proven substantially more popular in Belgium than France. Estelle came into vogue in the British Isles in the mid-19th century likely as a variant of the similar Stella which had recently become fashionable. Estelle was also promoted via utilization by a number of novelists who wrote in English, most notably Charles Dickens in variant form for the character Estella Havisham in his novel Great Expectations published in August 1861 after being serialized weekly from December 1860 with Estella being introduced in Chapter 8 on 19 January 1861. The general scholarly consensus is that in choosing Estella as the name of the remote love object of his novel's focal character: Pip - whose full given name is Philip - , Dickens was evoking Sir Philip Sidney's poetic wooing of the unattainable Stella in Astrophel and Stella (1591).