"Jude the Obscure" by Thomas Hardy (1895)

Hardy’s masterful last novel, a forceful, wide-ranging and subtly-erudite overview of the social foibles of the late Victorian society (we are in the 1880s in the south of England and in Oxford) as Hardy saw them, notably: a) the class barriers preventing labouring-class young people from being admitted into institutions of higher learning; b) the rigidity of the marriage institution, whereby people are forced by law and by intense social pressures to live out the rest of the days with what often turns out to be an unsuitable not to say worse kind of person; c) the intolerance of society in general and organized religion in particular towards extramarital sex and towards children born out of wedlock.

The generally-unfavourable reaction provoked at the time by this iconoclastic view of Victorian social mores, not to mention his own wife’s reaction to this outspoken denunciation of the marriage institution, caused Hardy to renounce novel writing (he was fifty-five years old, in the prime of his creative life) and to publish only poetry for the remaining 33 years of his long life.

(146,000 words)

All of the footnotes have been added for this edition of the novel.

An e-book is available for downloading below.

Jude the Obscure (e-book)