Jude the Obscure

Jude the Obscure
ISBN: 9780140435382
Publication Date: 2 September 1998

Jude Fawley, the stonemason excluded not by his wits but by poverty from the privileged world of Christminster, finds fulfilment in his relationship with Sue Bridehead. Both have left earlier marriages. Ironically, when tragedy tests their union it is Sue, the modern emancipated woman, who proves unequal to the challenge. Hardy's fearless exploration of sexual and social relationships and his radical critique of marriage scandalised the late Victorian establishment and marked the end of his career as a novelist. He then turned to poetry, having created in his last heroine, Sue Bridehead, an extraordinarily complex woman, an English Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina. This new Penguin Classics edition reprints the unbowdlerized first volume edition of 1895 of Jude the Obscure together with Hardy's 'Postscript' of 1912.

About the Author

Thomas Hardy was born in a cottage in Higher Bockhampton, near Dorchester, on 2 June 1840. He was educated locally and at sixteen was articled to a Dorchester architect, John Hicks. In 1862 he moved to London and found employment with another architect, Arthur Blomfield. He now began to write poetry and published an essay. By 1867 he had returned to Dorset to work as Hicks's assistant and began his first (unpublished) novel, The Poor Man and the Lady.

On an architectural visit to St Juliot in Cornwall in 1870 he met his first wife, Emma Gifford. Before their marriage in 1874 he had published four novels and was earning his living as a writer. More novels followed and in 1878 the Hardys moved from Dorset to the London literary scene. But in 1885, after building his house at Max Gate near Dorchester, Hardy again returned to Dorset. He then produced most of his major novels: The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), The Woodlanders (1887), Tess of the D'Urber...