Source identified
Read & copy the quotation
“I hope it did not end happily? I don’t like novels that end happily. They depress me so much.”
- Date
- 1895
- Local voice
- Fictional character · Cecily Cardew
Meaning of “I hope it did not end happily? I…”
Cecily reverses the conventional preference for happy endings, turning literary taste into a compact joke about boredom and expectation.
Where does it come from?
The Importance of Being Earnest, Act II; Cecily Cardew. Project Gutenberg #844 preserves the exact line in the complete Act II text. The Samuel French acting-text witness represented elsewhere on this source hub omits this Cecily / Miss Prism happy-ending exchange, so this record deliberately uses the complete-text witness rather than a guessed scan page.
Why the local voice matters
The Importance of Being Earnest, Act 2; Cecily responds while Miss Prism discusses her novel.
