Jude the Obscure

by Thomas Hardy

"I’m an outsider to the end of my days!"

Jude Fawley’s hopes of a university education are lost when he is trapped into marrying the earthy Arabella, who later abandons him. Moving to the town of Christminster where he finds work as a stonemason, Jude meets and falls in love with his cousin Sue Bridehead, a sensitive, freethinking "New Woman." Refusing to marry merely for the sake of religious convention, Jude and Sue decide instead to live together, but they are shunned by society and poverty soon threatens to ruin them. Jude the Obscure, Hardy’s last novel, caused a public furor when it was first published, with its fearless and challenging exploration of class and sexual relationships.

This edition uses the unbowdlerized text of the first volume edition of 1895, and also includes a list for further reading, appendices and a glossary. In his introduction, Dennis Taylor examines biblical allusions and the critique of religion in Jude the Obscure, and its critical reception that led Hardy to abandon novel writing.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

528 pages, Paperback

Published September 1, 1998

About the author

Thomas Hardy, OM, was an English author of the naturalist movement, although in several poems he displays elements of the previous romantic and enlightenment periods of literature, such as his fascination with the supernatural. He regarded himself primarily as a poet and composed novels mainly for financial gain.

The bulk of his work, set mainly in the semi-fictional land of Wessex, delineates characters struggling against their passions and circumstances. Hardy's poetry, first published in his 50s, has come to be as well regarded as his novels, especially after The Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

The term cliffhanger is considered to have originated with Thomas Hardy's serial novel A Pair of Blue Eyes in 1873. In the novel, Hardy chose to leave one of his protagonists, Knight, literally hanging off a cliff staring into the stony eyes of a trilobite embedded in the rock that has been dead for millions of years. This became the archetypal — and literal — cliff-hanger of Victorian prose.

Excerpted from Wikipedia.

Reviews

[Lucie Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

i clutched this one up icl
24 hours dedicated and scranned it up
jude you are so cool i love everything hardy writes atp

[Nada · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jude the Obscure is probably going to be my favorite read of Hardy. I randomly picked this book in a retired library in my hometown. It was on sale, and I didn’t have that much money with me.

I didn’t necessarily wish to start my summer to be read list with this one, but I ended up so, as I felt deeply pulled by the cover and the title. I spent a month and a half with this wonderful piece of art, annotating each end of chapter, each quote and each dialogue I found pleasing and worthy of remembering.

I happened to cry over a very specific event that occurred past middle the story. It shook me completely, and shattered my heart deeply. It positively forced me to rethink western traditional values, and helped me realize how many authors spent their lives writing rebelliously against the system that they were trapped in.

Hardy is probably one of the best English literature authors, if not the most underrated (in my opinion). We should pay more tribute to his work, which I think is left to gather dust due to its complexity and its unsettling underlying style.

[Big Penny Benny · Rating 2 out of 5]

Making me reconsider my preference to marry an Arabella.