Jude the Obscure
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'His style touches sublimity'
--T.S. Eliot
'The greatest tragic writer among English novelists'
--Virginia Woolf
--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
--T.S. Eliot
'The greatest tragic writer among English novelists'
--Virginia Woolf
--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
English Literature in Transition
"Broadview Press and editor Cedric Watts have done a splendid job."
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
23 of 25 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
If like me, your were put off Hardy by studying him at school or if you have in your mind's eye a writer obsessed with Wessex and a kind of moralising pastoralism, then try reading Jude. Here is a novel written with real emotional conviction and shot through with an anger which only comes from real experience. It is really a book about rebelling against conventions particularly about sexual morality and the aspirations of the artisan. Jude Fawley is an abandoned child who from his earliest years dreams of a richer fuller life both culturally and physically which he believes will be opened to him through higher education, symbolised by the distant spires of Christminster (Oxford). The passion with which Jude adores everything the venerable university stands for is only matched by his awareness of the futility of his dreams but that does not stop his hunger for books and learning which occupy his every free moment as he practices the trade of a stonemason. However, his sensual appetites override his academic ambitions and he finds himself imprisoned in a marriage devoid of the passion that brought it about. Meeting Sue Bridehead who he perceives as his soul mate underlines his captive state and they both come to question the very purpose of marriage resolving to live together without the need for a piece of paper. Yet the consequences of offending Victorian social codes are severe: from social exclusion to the loss of employment and indirectly the death of their children. Sue's response involves a return to the mindset she eschewed in her youth, Jude remains defiant bemoaning the fact that he was `fifty years ahead of his time' and coming to hold his beloved Oxford and its metaphysics in contempt. Rarely has the anguish of broken dreams had more resonance than here. Indeed Hardy prefigures the modernist obsession with self and the clash between impulse and duty. The tone throughout is bleak and often bitter, but the emotional dilemmas are so vivid and authentic that the scenes have genuine pathos and the characters the depth to engender sympathy. The book has a touch of the classical tragedy about it, and even Hardy's rather pedestrian language scarcely limits the power of his heartfelt plea for the tolerance of difference. If you haven't read Hardy begin here, if you think you don't like his work, Jude is the book to change your mind.
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Like many, I read Hardy novels at school rather than through choice. I was put off by his ability to take what seemed like pages to describe a tree!! This book was a gift and I am so grateful for it.
Jude's story is beautiful, heart-breaking, plausible and sincere. His desire to live a content life, demanding very little from society, is thwarted by poverty - and women! I shared his hope, his frustration, his sense of loss and his love for Christminster. I feel richer for having spent my time with Jude and plan to return to Hardy as a grown-up to see what it can offer me today. Do yourself a favour, read this book.
Jude's story is beautiful, heart-breaking, plausible and sincere. His desire to live a content life, demanding very little from society, is thwarted by poverty - and women! I shared his hope, his frustration, his sense of loss and his love for Christminster. I feel richer for having spent my time with Jude and plan to return to Hardy as a grown-up to see what it can offer me today. Do yourself a favour, read this book.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Suspend disbelief for the bizarre actions of the characters in this thought experiment exploring the nature of relationships, their permanence and the meaning of divorce and marriage. Hardy puts his characters into a situation and investigates what happens to them. The nub of the experiment is England's divorce law at the time of writing (1895) and the idea of living together as an unmarried couple. Hardy uses the book to explore two unhappy marriages and how impossible it was at the time for that unhappiness to be undone. His characters end the book far more miserably than they start out - beaten by the system and convention, both society's and their own.
The Jude of the title is a bright boy who thinks it will be possible to become an Oxford scholar through self-learning. This ambition is thwarted and snubbed and so he becomes an obscure stonemason. His dreamt-of life never really begins and for this he is forever wistful if not resentful. A teenage pregnancy leads him into an unplanned, unhappy, marriage from which he obtains a divorce and lives with his new found soul mate and fellow divorcee Sue. What should be blissful happiness is ruined because they live in sin, refusing to get married. The world shuns them and they are struck by awful tragedy. This turns Sue's mind and she comes to believe that God never recognized their respective divorces and she returns to her husband.
To say that this plot is a bit unlikely is putting it too nicely. At all times Jude and Sue have the power of their own salvation in their hands and yet they continually act in a perverse fashion. However that isn't really the point as the text of this book is a vehicle for exploration of the nature of relationships, and their earthly and heavenly permanence. In our world, with quickie divorce rampant, the discussion seems to come from another planet, but as a piece of social history this novel shows one step on the way to our modern society. The reaction at the time to this novel was so fierce that Hardy never wrote another and switched to poetry for the rest of his career.
The Jude of the title is a bright boy who thinks it will be possible to become an Oxford scholar through self-learning. This ambition is thwarted and snubbed and so he becomes an obscure stonemason. His dreamt-of life never really begins and for this he is forever wistful if not resentful. A teenage pregnancy leads him into an unplanned, unhappy, marriage from which he obtains a divorce and lives with his new found soul mate and fellow divorcee Sue. What should be blissful happiness is ruined because they live in sin, refusing to get married. The world shuns them and they are struck by awful tragedy. This turns Sue's mind and she comes to believe that God never recognized their respective divorces and she returns to her husband.
To say that this plot is a bit unlikely is putting it too nicely. At all times Jude and Sue have the power of their own salvation in their hands and yet they continually act in a perverse fashion. However that isn't really the point as the text of this book is a vehicle for exploration of the nature of relationships, and their earthly and heavenly permanence. In our world, with quickie divorce rampant, the discussion seems to come from another planet, but as a piece of social history this novel shows one step on the way to our modern society. The reaction at the time to this novel was so fierce that Hardy never wrote another and switched to poetry for the rest of his career.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Marriage under scrutiny
In the postscript to the preface of Jude The Obscure, Thomas Hardy quotes a German reviewer of the novel. Read more
Published 5 months ago by Philip Spires
Heart-felt misery
A thought provoking book. It follows the main character, Jude Fawley, as he follows his ambition of studying at the University of Christminister. Read more
Published 17 months ago by Max Watt
Misery
This is a tale of unrelentless misery! There is no happy ending and very little happiness around. In my opinion it dosn't have the bold characterisation of "Return of the Native"... Read more
Published 17 months ago by James I. Wilson
Jude: Reviewed
Jude Fawley is orphaned as a toddler and thrown into poverty to live with his aunt in Marygreen: a tiny hamlet in Hardy's semi-fictional `Wessex': the English county setting used... Read more
Published 18 months ago by TomCat
Painfully relevant
I've read this book twice - when I was unemployed 17 years ago, and for a second time now that I'm unemployed now. It really is the most marvellously depressing work. Read more
Published 18 months ago by Ruspeert
A Beautiful Reading by Jenny Sterlin
"For the flesh lusts against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; and these are contrary to one another, so that you do not do the things that you wish. Read more
Published 22 months ago by Donald Mitchell
Hey Jude, don't make it bad...
Thomas Hardy's infamous tale of moral indignation and social injustice was also his last, due in part to the moral indignation that ironically greeted its publication. Read more
Published 23 months ago by Captain Pugwash
Bleak and desolate
This has to be the gloomiest of all Hardy's depressing novels. Jude rises from his rural beginnings to win a scholarship to university but life is never that easy for Hardy's... Read more
Published on 21 Dec 2009 by Roman Clodia
Hardy's Best and My Favourite
This is an excellent novel by one of the great nineteenth century novelists and definitely one of my favourites. Read more
Published on 11 Jun 2009 by I. M. Knight
A (surprisingly) great novel!
I loved this book! When I decided to read it I had so many preconceptions about what it would be like (sadly, I used to equate Hardy with `boring'). I was so wrong. Read more
Published on 3 July 2008 by Suz
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