Gripping stuff: Donald Sutherland keeps reading right to the end in a scene from Pride and Prejudice
Photograph: AP

The World Book Day charity kicked off the countdown to this year's March 2 event yesterday, when it launched a survey on the subject of "happy endings" on its website, writes Sarah Crown.

The purpose of the questionnaire, it seems, is to discover the nation's best-loved happy ending; questionees (all of whom are automatically entered into a draw to win £50-worth of book tokens) are furnished with a list of 14 titles, from which they are invited to select their favourite. The titles on offer range from the thumpingly predictable (Pride and Prejudice, surely guaranteed to romp home with the crown) to the frankly baffling (Rebecca? Nothing puts a smile on my face like returning home to find my house in flames ...).

In fact, as I read down the list, I found my mind occupied not, as expected, with the mildly engaging if slightly saccharine question of which happy ending was the happiest, but rather with the question of whether the proffered endings could really be called "happy" at all. Most of them do indeed close on a vision of the star-crossed lovers united at last, and so are, I suppose, technically "happy" in the sense of a Shakespearean comedy.

But this seems to me to be a very narrow definition of happiness - and one that, in the examples offered here, is unlikely to yield the fairytale conclusion of "and they all lived happily ever after".

In Jane Eyre, the union of hero and heroine is rather compromised by Rochester's injury and blindness in the fire that killed his first wife and destroyed his house (and that's before we even get to issues such as Jane's resignation of her long-sought-after independence, the probability that Rochester would be an absolute bugger to live with, and the fact that book actually ends with the death of St John Rivers in India). In Love in the Time of Cholera, the happy lovers are condemned to float the seas forever on their exiled ship; The Time Traveler's Wife, meanwhile, concludes with husband and wife on the cusp of reunion - but the husband in question is dead, and the wife in her late eighties.

All of which raises the question of what, exactly, we mean by a "happy" ending. One has only to consider something like Shakespeare's Measure for Measure to recognize that marriage doesn't necessarily signify happiness, and Pride and Prej aside (and who's to say how Darcy will behave after he's got that ring on Lizzy's finger?), even the unions in these endings don't appear to be uncomplicatedly "happy".

But perhaps the question is referring not to which ending would make us happiest if we were to live through it in the real world, but to the feeling of satisfaction engendered in the reader? To Kill a Mockingbird is probably my favourite ending on the list, despite the fact that it ends with Tom Robinson dead and Bob Ewell murdered by Boo Radley. In fact, it moves me to tears every time I read it - but it is, at the same time, beautiful and profound.

The questionnaire is odd in another respect, too. It goes on to ask us which sad ending we'd most like to resolve - which again, to me, misses the point that tragic endings are, and are surely intended to be, deeply satisfying. The idea of Anna and Vronsky moving to a cottage with roses around the door and having a football team of beaming children is, of course, ludicrous. Nearly as bad is the concept of some smiling French judges allowing Charles Darnay off with, say, a good ticking-off, thus ruining Dickens's brilliant final plot twist and guaranteeing confusion for ever more. It was the best of times, it was, er, the best of times? I don't think so.

So, somewhat in the spirit of the questionnaire but also gleefully subverting it, I have just one question for you: what's your favourite tragic ending? Points awarded for poignancy. See if you can reduce the hard-bitten arts desk to tears.