Not all stories have happy endings.
SSC 104 was added to the catalog over the past weekend, including a story I recorded. One Hour More by Anna Katharine Green (wikipedia, LibriVox) is the second longest entry in this collection, and the longest single recording I’ve done to date (37m 36s). A story involving love requited but unspoken, it is thus a tragedy. This is the first time this story has appeared in the LibriVox catalog, but many of Green’s other works are available.
Green was the first (or, per a recent note I came across, one of the first) female detective fiction writer in America. Born in Brooklyn, New York, she set many of her stories among the genteel professions of the city — lawyers, doctors, business owners — and in her modern age. Over the course of her writing, transportation goes from horse-drawn carriage to automobile, and communication from messenger boy to an at-home telephone. But she also set stories in smaller towns and rural areas outside the city, and one of my favorites is set a few decades after the Revolutionary War. Like many other writers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, her writing is a bit verbose, but I think well worth the listen.