What the...?

Well and so. I'm sitting at home writing a comparative essay on a bunch of English Renaissance texts, and alternately reading a Georgette Heyer novel to take my mind off things.

The essay is ... getting there. Right now I'm about to start a paragraph on feminine chastity and how it's a real fascination of these texts, and need to find some way to make it link in with the ideal of nobility, which is what the essay is officially about.

On the other hand, the novel is getting weird. (Georgette Heyer, Lady of Quality, (London: Arrow Books, 2005).) The female lead has fallen in love with the male lead, the male lead has fallen in love with the female lead, and he's just proposed to her! There's nearly 70 pages left to go! What is she thinking! I should add that in Heyer's world it isn't at all unusual for the proposal, or even marriage, to happen very early in the piece, but the complication there is the marriage of convenience, and the need for both partners to realise that they're actually in love with their spouses. Here, there is no such complication.

I'm so confused...

EDIT: A bunch of people got the flu. I say again: What the...?
EDIT2: Essay going well. Just managed to squeeze in a gratuitous reference to Volpone which we haven't even been studying, because the Celia subplot fit in well with the whole chastity thing. 1200 words down, another 1800 to go. Well, that's the upper limit, anyway. I need to come up with at least another 1300 to be legal. I've never had to write an essay of this length before. It's interesting having all that extra room to move around in.