cbutler says:
I read this book years ago, and found the ending to be anything but lacking in sentimentality. In fact, I found it to be melodramatic in the extreme. One of my favorite professors in college insisted that we read it, but I have to say I didn't get the point.

Chance says:
Well I haven't finished reading Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, I'm about a third of the way through it. She has a job in the garment industry in Manhatten about 1890. She makes collars all day on a tredell sewing machine, she lives with her mother who drinks whiskey for brekfast and busts up the furniture in the tenament flat they live in, I'm not finding anything sentimental in that.