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  • Published: 1 October 2010
  • ISBN: 9781409059608
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 528

Jude the Obscure




A brooding tragedy which scandalised Hardy's contemporaries on first publication. Now reissued to mark the 180th anniversary of Hardy's birth with a new illustrated jacket in the beautiful Hardy series style.

'One of the most compassionate of all writers...you feel a kind of agony of helpless tenderness in the writer for all troubled souls’ The Times

Jude Fawley is a young man who longs to better himself and go to Christminster University. However, poverty forces him into a job as a stonemason and an unhappy marriage. When his wife leaves him Jude moves to Christminster determined to follow his dream. There he meets and falls for his free-spirited cousin, Sue Bridehead. They refuse to marry, much to the disapproval of the community around them. In this heartbreaking story Hardy shows the devastating effects of social prejudice and oppression.

The novel caused outrage when it was published in 1895 and, as a result, was the last novel Hardy ever wrote.

See also: The Return of the Native

  • Published: 1 October 2010
  • ISBN: 9781409059608
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 528

Other books in the series

Emma
Persuasion
A Dog's Heart
The Black Tulip
The Lady of the Camellias
Selected Poetry
On Sparta
Man and Superman
Saint Joan
Botchan
Kusamakura
Sanshiro
Love
Annals
Military Dispatches

About the author

Thomas Hardy


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 By 1867 he had returned to Dorset to work as Hicks's assistant and began his first (unpublished) novel, The Poor Man and the Lady.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'Urbervilles (1891), The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved (1892) and Jude the Obscure (1895). Amidst the controversy caused by Jude the Obscure, he turned to the poetry he had been writing all his life. In the next thirty years he published over nine hundred poems and his epic drama in verse, The Dynasts.

After a long and bitter estrangement, Emma Hardy died at Max Gate in 1912. Paradoxically, the event triggered some of Hardy's finest love poetry. In 1914, however, he married Florence Dugdale, a close friend for several years. In 1910 he had been awarded the Order of Merit and was recognized, even revered, as the major literary figure of the time. He died on 11 January 1928. His ashes were buried in Westminster Abbey and his heart at Stinsford in Dorset.

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Praise for Jude the Obscure

To no tragic novelist do we surrender more completely at the last...one of the most compassionate of all writers...you feel a kind of agony of helpless tenderness in the writer for all troubled souls

The Times

Hardy may have been born in 1840 shortly after Victoria came to the throne, but he speaks to the 20th century rather than the 19th.

Independent

Visceral, passionate, sylvan...anti-hypocrisy, anti-repression..dealing with love, death, with young people with everything before them, dealt a cruelly stacked hand... Hardy reaches deeper, into our wildest recesses. In a safe world, he speaks to our animal side.

Evening Standard

A classic outsider novel. An anthem to misery.

Katy Guest, The Independent