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What Is The Ending Of Tell It To The Bees?

Spoilers please! That last chapter left me feeling bittersweet, but I'm hoping I missed some hopeful subtext about Lydia and Jean's future together.
2025-12-22 04:53:54
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9 Answers

Best Answer
bnmmnbb53
bnmmnbb53
I seem to recall that the film Tell It to the Bees ends by having Lydia and Jean leave town together after being severely persecuted for their relationship by the very bigoted townsfolk. I left the cinema feeling quietly hopeful for the pair of them. As for stories of difficult escape with a sense of earned peace, recently I finished reading the novel Rest, Honey by Nilah Magruder. A cancelled person with a dark past attempts to create a new identity for herself under a new name. All of the painstaking detail to constructing and maintaining said new identity makes the novel’s eventual calm so very earned.
2026-08-03
Zane
Zane
There is so much in ‘Tell It to the Bees’ that I have re-read it three times to try to take it all in. The way that Jean’s departure from the town is portrayed is not as some kind of defeat for her, but as her liberation. The town had been cheering Jean’s brilliant medical skills, but had been horridly homophobic in relation to her love for another woman. But in the end the town’s hypocrisy collapses in on itself. The climax of the story depends on the full development of Lydia as a character, from passive wife to someone who wants to be happy. Charlie’s love for Jean is shown through his deep affection for the bees that Jean looks after, and in the end it is natural that he wants to go with her. The way that Shaw has told this story is also brilliant in that it is totally free from melodrama. The story does not have to end with some kind of courtroom confrontation or powerful speech. Instead it ends with the simple picture of Lydia closing her front door and going off down the garden path, holding the hand of Charlie. The bees in the story shift from being symbols of gossip and nastiness to symbols of resilience and Jean’s love. The ending of this story is a wonderful and powerful masterclass in quiet, queer, revolutionary storytelling.
2025-12-25
Kate
Kate
I loved the way the novel ended, giving us complete emotional whiplash. After reading Jean’s difficult departure from Jarretsville, I fretted that poor Lydia had been left all alone – but she wasn’t! The final chapter found the pair on the outskirts of town, no dialogue but vivid description of the worn soles on Lydia’s feet, the rustling bee jar in Charlie’s bag. It was beautifully raw and unfinished – perfectly, deeply emotional. We’re left not knowing what will become of Jean and her love in the long run, but the powerful choice they made to find each other in the face of incredible adversity is enough for me. And the bees? Once feared, now positively buzzing with promise.
2025-12-28
Yvette
Yvette
This novel by Fiona Shaw has a bittersweet yet hopeful ending for Dr. Jean Markham and her love Lydia Weekes. Even though their relationship caused quite a bit of upset in their small town, in the end it was Jean losing her practice and Lydia’s ex-husband attempting to take their son, Charlie, away from her that led to them being torn apart. However, they do manage to be together again as the novel comes to an end when Lydia and Charlie secretly travel to join Jean in a different part of the country. They had chosen to be different in a time when so much was expected of people in 1950s Britain and in leaving had chosen love and freedom over oppression.

What I found particularly effective in the end of the book was that there was no neat tie up for the characters. In the end Fiona Shaw does not give them a victory parade. Instead they just quietly slip away to start anew. It is very realistic for the time in which queer relationships took place. There was no drama, no fireworks. Just the quiet resolve of the two women to be together against all odds. In the end the bees become a symbol of their flight into freedom. A fragile but powerful image. And for me the final scene where Lydia is packing up the remains of their household and Charlie is clutching his bee jar tightly to him is heartbreakingly delicate but full of hope.
2025-12-28
Xavier
Xavier
This ending is incredible. Because Jean is forced out of town, it would be so easy for Lydia to choose to stay in town with Charlie. But instead she grabs him and off they go. The end of the book does not provide a neat “and they lived happily ever after” for the two of them. But the final image on the road with Jean and Lydia in each other’s arms is so achingly open-ended. Will they be back in this town in a few months? Next year? And where will they go in between? The whole book felt like Shaw was building towards this moment for the two of them, and the bees that buzzed around in the background of their entire relationship finally feel like a promise instead of a secret that Jean and Lydia share. Shaw’s writing of this scene makes me ache with desire for them, and also leaves me with this feeling of hope against hope that they will be okay despite the cruel world that they live in. And that love is stubborn.
2025-12-28

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