@strangebedfellows said:

So, I forced myself to watch the final episode and it was as I had expected. Nothing explained - no reasons given for anything that happened and no visual definition of what the girls ended up doing, or indeed how the youngest one ended up as she did as the last we saw of her she was running away. The back story of the headmistress felt like we had come in half way through so we didn't really know what had happened to her and her associates to make her run or indeed how one of those associates had ended up in exactly the same place as her. The ending made no sense for either her or the girls. The little epilogue was meaningless as this was a work of fiction. I detest stories where I am expected to fill in gaps that the writers have no explanation for so chalk it up to a "mystery". Whispering rocks and windy tresses and over affectionate young women do not a mystery make.

That was the way the original film ended too. Were you hoping that they would make something up to appease the newbies?

I haven't seen the original film - I don't want to be appeased - just satisfied with a story well told that doesn't expect me to make up my own answers to their "mysteries" which in my mind is a weak excuse for writing themselves into a corner they can't get out of.

@strangebedfellows said:

I haven't seen the original film - I don't want to be appeased - just satisfied with a story well told that doesn't expect me to make up my own answers to their "mysteries" which in my mind is a weak excuse for writing themselves into a corner they can't get out of.

Sorry I didn't mean to sound snarky. The book ended the same way. But in her original manuscript there was a different ending where some of the mystery was explained but her publisher talked her into leaving that chapter out of the book.

I did hear that the mystery was explained early on in the book - I think it very unfair on the author to mess with their work like that - it's not the publisher that gets blamed for poor story telling. Still, I suppose he/she got what they wanted when it went on to become an iconic work !!

As mentioned, there was a film, and a short discussion on the message board there.

The missing chapter of the novel was later published: "The Secret of Hanging Rock (1987)" by Joan Lindsay.

Thank you wonder2wonder.