Write a bad ending...I dare you...

There has been a lot of discussion of endings in this class. I find it very interesting that every novel we have read has had a nice, if almost unbelievable ending. I feel as if most novels I read from this period have this kind of ending. We have seen it in Austen, but also the Bronte sisters do this in both Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. All these novels spend the first 300 pages putting the characters through strife and misery but at the end everything turns out ok. Good triumphs, evil falls and everyone seems to have money or at least be financially comfortable. Why? I might be a sucker for tragic endings but I just find when the first 300 pages were tragic why wouldn't it end tragically? It always seems to me either the author just wanted to finish the story so they just create all these plot twists to wrap it up or they want to reward the reader. When I consider the audience, women reading these novels at home, perhaps they needed the nice ending to justify their reading. If things ended poorly or immorally then perhaps they would just stop reading them. So, perhaps the authors knew their audience and so they created a nice and neat ending in which good prevails--otherwise they would lose their readership.