Hope for a happy ending

Hope for a happy ending is not a promise that suffering will be undone; it is a possibility the characters repeatedly imagine, lose, and reshape. Through Sunday Small’s abandoned-child fantasy, Daisy Branning’s fear for her unborn child, and the family assembled through care rather than blood, the novel asks what makes a life feel capable of beginning again. Its answers remain hard-won: hope can survive grief, but it changes when the expected rescue never comes.

A fantasy of return

As a child, Sunday imagined that the mother who had left her on the steps of the workhouse must have had a good reason and would one day return. In that private story, reunion meant leaving the institution together and living happily ever after. The fantasy gave abandonment a future-facing shape, but it also made the absence harder to accept. Sunday eventually decides that her mother is either dead or did not want her; she is no longer young enough to believe in the ending she once invented.

That history surfaces when Daisy, distressed by her pregnancy, asks whether the baby could be given away. Sunday does not dismiss Daisy’s pain, but she asks her to consider what the child might feel on learning that its own mother had not wanted it. Sunday speaks from the force of her own experience: she had never known loving parents, and in the workhouse Mrs Lockett was the only person who showed her kindness. Her appeal turns her childhood hope into a warning. A child’s longing for a loving home cannot be treated as a harmless fantasy when abandonment may be the reality it is trying to explain.

Daisy is ashamed by the comparison, yet Sunday’s words do not make her feelings disappear. She continues on in despair, believing that the burden is hers and that there is no way out. The scene therefore refuses a simple redemptive use of Sunday’s past: what she has endured gives her insight into the child’s possible loneliness, but it cannot provide Daisy with an easy resolution.

Grief tests the promise

The deaths around Sunday and the people she loves repeatedly interrupt the expectation that affection will protect anyone from loss. After Daisy dies, five people light a candle, pray, and sit together remembering her. At the funeral in Chilvers Coton churchyard, Tommy Branning looks down at the mahogany coffin and cannot believe his sister is gone. He imagines waking from a nightmare to find her smiling and caring for him as before. Sunday cries beside him, unable on this rare occasion to hold back her tears. Tommy’s grief does not quickly yield to consolation: Daisy’s death has left him feeling alone, and it takes a long time for him to accept its finality.

Lady Lavinia Huntley’s presence at the funeral offers a different, more guarded form of endurance. She attends despite Ashley Huntley’s instruction that, because of her condition, she should not be seen abroad. Daisy’s death makes her earlier efforts to get Daisy and Tommy out of the workhouse seem pointless. She nevertheless believes Tommy will survive because he is loved, recalling that after her own babies died she somehow carried on with Zillah beside her. Her reflection does not make bereavement fair or reparable. It distinguishes continuing to live from receiving the happy ending one had wanted.

That distinction returns with Stephen Huntley’s death. After his funeral, Treetops Manor mourns; the familiar sounds of Molly moving between kitchen and nursery and babies crying for feeds give way to silence. Lavinia withdraws to her room and does not speak or emerge until the funeral. When she tells Ashley that Stephen has died, he is astonished and initially suspects a cruel joke; she reminds him that his son’s funeral has already taken place. The episode places hope under strain once more, showing how a family’s future can be narrowed by death and by the absence of care when it is needed.

Belonging beyond the imagined ending

After Tommy leaves, Sunday tells Annie that she will survive, then goes out to tend the animals while hiding how bereft she feels. Daisy is dead and Tommy has gone; the two companions in whom Sunday had found solace are no longer beside her. She wonders whether anyone will ever be hers and whether a happy-ever-after ending is simply not meant for her. Her composure is a way of bearing loss, not evidence that it has passed.

Yet Sunday’s idea of family has already widened beyond the mother she once expected to return. Biddy Spooner and Jacob have become the nearest thing to a family she has known, and she cannot imagine leaving them. On a trip to London, she reflects that wealth and fame matter less than good family and friends, a safe place to live, and people one loves. The thought carries sadness: Sunday has accepted that her mother will not seek her out, and that Biddy and the people at Whittleford Lodge may be as close to a family of her own as she will have. Biddy senses her pain and squeezes her hand. The comfort is modest and present-tense, grounded in companionship rather than a miraculous return.

Sunday also keeps Daisy in that chosen circle of belonging. During the trip she plans to press flowers between the pages of a book so she can place them on Daisy’s grave when she gets home. Her remembrance does not reverse Daisy’s death; it gives their friendship a continuing form. Hope, here, lies less in escaping grief than in carrying love into life after loss.

Dreams deferred, possibilities reopened

Sunday’s wish to establish a home for foundling children grows from her memories of the workhouse nursery and the babies who needed care. Even while grateful for her place in the Spooner household, she doubts the dream can become real: she would need to buy a property large enough for the children and find the means to clothe, feed, and educate them. Her wages could never meet those costs, even if she lived to be a hundred. The dream remains morally vivid while seeming materially impossible.

Marriage to Jacob appears, briefly, as a possible route toward that ambition, but Sunday recognizes that she does not love him. She senses that she should wait for something, though she cannot yet name what it is. This pause matters: the novel does not equate a socially available future with a happy one, nor does it present Sunday as willing to trade emotional truth for the means to achieve her goal.

A later conversation with Tom Branning opens another possibility without settling the future. Tom asks Sunday to consider Lavinia’s account and reminds her that Lavinia had been told her baby was stillborn; she did not know Sunday was alive. He describes how distressed Lavinia was while they were trying to find Sunday and asks her to consider allowing her mother a chance to make up for the lost years. Sunday agrees only to think about it. The old fantasy of being sought and reclaimed returns in altered form: the reunion she once imagined did not happen in childhood, but the possibility of a relationship with her mother has not necessarily ended. The novel’s hope for a happy ending rests in that distinction—less a guarantee of perfect restoration than an opening through which care, choice, and a different future may still enter.