‘Jude the Obscure’ is the last completed novel by the legendary English writer Thomas Hardy. One of Hardy’s ‘Wessex’ novel (a fictional region of Britain that Hardy invented), the book is generally acknowledged as one of the author’s masterpieces.
The story concerns a young scholar, Jude Fawley, who dreams of a classical education at the fictional ‘Christminster University’ (modeled on Oxford), but who instead is drawn into a disastrous marriage. After his wife leaves him, he courts (and eventually becomes involved with) his free-spirited cousin, Sue Bridehead, but her fear of intimacy puts enormous strain upon the marriage.
What follows is a complex and shockingly tragic story entwining themes of organized religion, class structure, marital strife and homicide in a book that has been widely praised as one of the finest books in the history of English literature. Thomas Hardy’s ‘Jude the Obscure’ is presented here in its original and unabridged format.
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Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) was an English novelist and poet best known for his dramatic novels set in the west of England in a fictionalized area known as Wessex. Hardy came from humble origins (his father was a stonemason) but he received encouragement in his education from his mother and attended school in Dorchester until he began an apprenticeship at 16, studying to become an architect. Eventually, he would move to London and continue his education at King’s College London and worked on various architectural projects through the 1860’s. But young Hardy had a love of literature and attempted to get an early novel published in as early as 1867. He could not find a publisher and abandoned the book, finally publishing his first two novels anonymously in the early 1870’s. His publications of Far from the Madding Crowd in 1874 finally brought Hardy the success and literary renown he craved and his subsequent books, The Return of the Native (1878), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) and especially Tess of the d’Urbevilles (1891) proved to be enormously successful, if controversial because of their themes of class division, sex, religion and marriage. This would come to a head with his publication of Jude the Obscure in 1895, which brought strong condemnation from the conservative Victorian public as well as church officials. The notoriety and negative press surrounding the publication naturally only caused the book to become even more popular. By the 1900’s, Hardy’s financial and literary legacy was secure and he spent the rest of his life devoted almost entirely to writing poetry, including a number of significant war poems inspired by the Boer Wars and World War I. In December of 1927, he became ill with pleurisy and died on January 11, 1928 at his home in Dorchester at the age of 87.
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