I often have books I start and stall out on, or that seemed like ideal reading at the time, and then the time passes, and it's hard to finish them. (This especially happens with scholarly books started while traveling: I really need to read the last 80 pages or so of "Bumblebee Economics" but other things seem more attractive when I only have a little time to read and it's late in the evening...)
Two books recently, I kind of stalled out on when I found out the "denoument" of the plot.
One was "Why Shoot a Butler," which is a Georgette Heyer mystery. I really enjoy her mysteries. She only wrote a few, compared to her Regency romances, but they are entertaining and well-written and feature enough upper-middle-class twits to have a laugh at. (There is also often a slightly-poorer relation, usually female, who turns out to be the One Sane Woman (to use a trope) of the piece).
Well, with Why Shoot a Butler, there's some 30-40 pages after you learn who did it, where the story kind of winds down and you find out who will be married to whom (And again: I guess it was different years back? But it seems that women often rapidly change their allegiance of whom they want to marry...I can't imagine suddenly deciding after knowing a chap for, say, two weeks, that I want to hitch my destiny to his (And divorce was harder and much more looked down on, if it turned out your "picker" was broken when you picked him). Maybe I'm just far too cautious and too prone to worry about bad consequences, but it just blows my mind when a woman either decides yes, she wants to marry this guy she knows almost nothing about, or, it turns out her intended wasn't such a great guy any more, but hey! Here's a new guy, why not try marrying HIM? I suppose on the grounds that you can't be so unlucky twice in a row?) Anyway, once I found out WHY the butler got shot (and the young drunkard got drowned), and the murderer was done for, I kind of lost interest. I'm not even sure I actually finished the book....
And now, with Adam Bede. How to talk about this without giving spoilers?
Well, okay. Spoilers there will be. I still think the book is worth reading (if you like early Victorian literature and George Eliot's style).
The book starts off fairly idyllically: here is Adam Bede, good strong young man. Kind to his mother. Hard worker. He weathers the death of his drunkard father. It is time for him to think of being married. Will he pick sweet Mary Burge, who is the daughter of his employer (and therefore, set himself up for Good Things in the future), or will he pick Hetty Sorrel, who is admittedly pretty but who is immature and somewhat spoiled?
Well, the young noble Arthur Donnithorne - who owns the land for miles around (or rather, who will come to own it when his grandfather dies) - also notices how pretty Hetty is. But eventually he leaves to be a soldier, and of course, he COULDN'T marry Hetty, there is far too much difference in their class.
But Adam can. And he asks her, and she consents, all the while thinking of and wishing for Arthur....
And after here, there be spoilers....
Arthur's flirtation with Hetty is more than mere flirtation. It is stated he kisses her, and he gave her jewelry, but later on, and this is what the story hinges on in its last third, it turns out they did far more than kiss.
And it's interesting how a Victorian author, who, even if she's slightly unconventional in her lifestyle like Eliot was, is still bound by certain constrictions, reveals that, yes, in fact, this young woman is pregnant out of wedlock.....And Hetty runs away, first to get to Windsor, where she believes Arthur to be in training (in reality, he has left for Ireland; I suppose it was one of those "putting down a rebellion" things)
And the horror of it, and this is where I really turned on Hetty, I admit, and stopped thinking of her as so much one "more to be pitied than censured," but, after giving birth, rather than leaving her baby on a church steps or somewhere where it would surely be found and cared for, she buries it, alive, in a shallow grave, out in a field. Because she can't imagine not being found out and the shame she will face.
Well, she IS found out, and it goes far, far worse with her than it would have had she left the baby somewhere where it would become a foundling (I don't think we even learn the baby's sex....) There she might have experienced shame and embarrassment, it would have been hard for her to return to her home with her head up. I suspect Adam would still have married her; he seems that kind of man. But of course, like many selfish people, she cannot see beyond her own wants or desires.
And she is found out. Brought to trial, convicted, sentenced to hang for her crime. During her time in prison, Dinah Morris, the good, Godly young Methodist preacher-lady (and Hetty's cousin) comes to her and just sits with her - so she won't be alone. She even gets in the tumbril with Hetty on the morning of her execution (which, in a happier universe, would have been the morning of the day she married Adam)
I admit, at that point I was skipping ahead - did Hetty get the noose? Surely she'd have to.
Nope. Arthur somehow gets a pardon, riding up at a frantic pace (well, okay, he is capable of some sort of decency) but apparently we don't hear from Hetty again. This is the one thing that's making me go through to the end - does she merely drop out of sight as a "ruined woman" or does she return. As far as I've read so far, she doesn't.
In fact, Adam winds up marrying Dinah, apparently. (I'm going to have to read to see how THAT happens; his younger brother Seth proposed to Dinah several times and Dinah said she was not going to marry, that her work was too important to her....)
But, wow. It went very differently in the last third or so of the book than I expected. (Also, a lot of the details of what Hetty did and the birth of her baby were seriously lampshaded....you read right through the straight account of her time at the inn when she had the baby, and there is NO MENTION MADE - merely that she had been "ill" and then was "much better" and then she left. You learn, later on, when she confesses to Dinah, that that was when she had the child.....it's not clear if it's deliberate lampshading (to mislead the reader) or if it is an attempt to show Hetty's state of mind, that she was so mentally divorced from the fact that she was having and had had a baby that she couldn't admit it to herself until after she had been convicted of what she did. (In modern times? Perhaps she'd have been found not guilty by reason of insanity?)
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