RedHotRomance

Spoiler alert: Is there anyone else out there besides me who never before read The Mill on the Floss? If you haven't and you intend to, you might want to stop here.

For everybody else, did you want to throttle George Eliot when you came to the end of the book? I've actually been a George Eliot fan since the ninth grade (a long time ago), when I read Silas Marner. Over the years, I've, with pleasure, dipped into her oeuvre, but somehow had never experienced Mill. As I was going through the book recently, I once again appreciated Eliot's skill in writing. Yeah, the book is overlong, fine for nineteenth-century standards, more of a challenge to stick with in our ADD era. But underneath the excess, I could see Eliot working her craft. Raise the stakes. Torture your characters. Man, she kept doing that.

But, for some reason (maybe denial), I anticipated the HEA (happily ever after) ending that I've come to regard as normal (even though I've just sold a story where it's hard to view the ending as an HEA in the traditional sense). Heck, I craved for Mill to have an HEA because the characters I'd come to care about deserved it. I wasn't exactly sure how Eliot was going to pull that rabbit out of the hat she'd created, but that's part of what kept me reading.

Eliot's ending hit me in the face with the force of a slap, and I howled. It was definitely not an HEA for the characters I was rooting for. George Eliot, or rather Mary Ann Evans, or whatever the heck you want to be called, come back and explain yourself! Why'd you end the story the way you did (sniffle, whine)?