Hardy’s Novel-Endings

Abstract

‘Nearly all novels are feeble at the end’, and ‘If it was not for death and marriage I do not know how the average novelist would conclude’, E. M. Forster writes in Aspects of the Novel. If not jaundiced, the view is too dismissive; it might seem to suggest that most of Hardy’s endings can hardly be regarded as successful or commendable. Forster thinks the use of marriage as a finale in fiction is ‘idiotic’, though it could have been anything but that for editors of magazines dependent on serialized fiction in the nineteenth century, when most of their readers were young women who still, like Caroline Helstone in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley, had few careers but marriage to which they could hopefully look forward. As late as 1890 Hardy protests in ‘Candour in English Fiction’ against the insincerity of novels adjusted to ‘the regulation finish’ that ‘they married and were happy ever after’. Critics have complained that Jane Austen responded almost automatically to such a formula, but this young lady knew how to look after herself, how to avoid the conventional and cosy; she was never guilty of a facile ending. Her conclusions satisfy her readers, but marriage never comes without unforeseeable setbacks and suffering, and some of her heroines are of such character or inexperience that one can assume they have yet to learn from mistakes, though they are in too good hands to encounter disaster. Jane Austen can be both amusingly and movingly realistic, especially so at the end of Emma.