Wives and Daughters

Goodreads keeps sending me these emails asking how my progress is going on my book I started reading 150 days ago.
Not well, as if they needed to ask.
Wives and Daughters is by Elizabeth Gaskell. It was written 50 years after Jane Austen died, and it doesn't have quite as much of a literary feel to it. I think it was the pop fiction of its day. It has been a nice read.
At the beginning, I especially loved the father character. He is hilarious, and he also has a close and comfortable relationship to his daughter. Unfortunately, it's not called Wives and Daughters because it's about the dad. A stepmother enters the picture, and while she isn't terribly wicked, she does drive a wedge between the father and daughter. I found myself missing the father, which was probably the point, as the main character misses her father as well.
So I liked it for the first 550 or so pages. But now I'm on page 600, and for the life of me, I'm not sure I'll ever make it to the end on 644. These last pages have been torturous!
First of all, it's an unfinished novel. Gaskell died before it was finished, meaning that while I know what's going to happen (main character is single, long hoped for suitor is suddenly available), it's not actually going to happen. Not much motivation to get to the end when there is none.
Second of all, and most importantly, I'm sick of everyone getting sick and dying. I swear, someone gets startled by a thunderclap, and next thing you know they're sick, pale, and in bed with a fever for a few weeks. A bunch of the characters have already died, and none of them from any good reason. They just gradually felt kind of uneasy, and next thing you know, they're dying of consumption or something. I realize that back before they knew about germs, that's how they thought these things worked, but it still doesn't make for a very compelling read.
Okay, I should probably just finish the darn thing. Back in high school, I had to read Middlemarch by George Eliot, and I got about 600 or 700 pages in it before I realized the plot had never started. I just couldn't read another page of "a day in the life of a bunch of boring people in a boring little town called Middlemarch." I didn't finish it. I failed English that term and ended up with a C on my transcript my final semester of high school. I kind of wish I'd finished that one.... but not enough to go back and actually do it.
If any of last year's English students are reading this, please disregard the previous paragraph. I was always a perfect student and always did all of my homework. In fact, I read every single page of every single book my teachers assigned me.
Ahem.
So I'm going to finish the last 44 pages now. Don't expect an update on how it ends. Because it doesn't.