11 May 2018
To Live Happily Ever After; (Dis)satisfaction in the Ending of Middlemarch
I
I certainly felt a great deal of satisfaction upon reaching the final sentence of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, having seen a novel of this length through and achieving some sort of conclusion after observing her characters learn and grow over the course of almost 850 pages. Therefore, I would like to begin this paper with the end. The novel closes with an epilogue or Finale in which the reader discovers that Dorothea and Will get married, have children, and essentially live happily ever after. Several emotions ran through my mind as I processed this final chapter of Dorothea’s story.