I was a teenager when I read this book. There was something about
Hardy's harsh, fatalistic world that appealed to me then. Despite,
or maybe because of, the pessimism, I think I found it rather
romantic and I read everything of his that I could lay my hands on.
Then I got to Jude. And Jude was just so sad, so unfair, so much
about fate shafting a good man in all kinds of ways, that I
overdosed on Hardy and could never read him again. But I still
remember sitting on my bed and crying my heart out at the injustice
of it all. I cried so much my mother came upstairs to check I was
all right. I think she was worried about a teenage excess of
emotion. Maybe that was what I liked about Hardy all along: you can
shamelessly feel as you read him. REVIEWED BY WILLIAM WAKE (Kirkus
UK)
‘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 furore 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.
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