Jude the Obscure

Jude Fawley, a poor stonemason with a real gift for Latin taught himself in stolen hours, dreams for years of studying at Christminster, Hardy's fictional stand in for Oxford, only to find every door there closed to a working man without money or connections. He is tricked into an early, disastrous marriage by Arabella Donn, a butcher's daughter who fakes a pregnancy to trap him, and once free of her he falls in love instead with his cousin Sue Bridehead, a sharp, freethinking woman who shares his intellectual hunger and shares, too, his growing conviction that the marriage laws binding them both to unhappy unions are simply wrong. Jude and Sue live together unmarried by principle rather than by circumstance, raising children together including Jude's own son by Arabella, a strange, solemn boy the family nicknames Little Father Time, and their refusal to marry costs them work, housing, and the respect of every community they try to settle in. The novel's central catastrophe arrives when Little Father Time, believing the family's poverty and the younger children are his own fault, kills his half siblings and himself, leaving a note that reads, in his own spelling, Done because we are too menny. Devastated and convinced the tragedy is a judgment on their unsanctioned life together, Sue leaves Jude and returns to her legal husband, the schoolmaster Phillotson, out of what she experiences as religious penance rather than love, while Jude, broken and drinking heavily, lets Arabella maneuver him back into marrying her again. He dies alone and ill in Christminster not long after, his old dream of the university still audible in the sounds of a degree ceremony he can hear through his window, while Arabella, already eyeing her next prospect, shows no real grief at all.

Hardy's final novel is also his angriest, an open indictment of marriage law, class barriers, and the religious respectability that punishes Jude and Sue for wanting lives the world has no room for. It is a genuinely bleak book with almost no relief built into its structure, and it demands more of a reader's endurance than Hardy's earlier novels, though the clarity and conviction of its anger give it a force his gentler books do not carry.

Hardy's own thwarted early ambition to study at university without the money to do so shaped Jude directly, and his wife Emma reportedly objected to the novel in part because she recognized their own strained marriage inside Jude and Sue's.