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Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Jude the Obscure created storms of scandal and protest for the author upon its publication. Hardy, disgusted and disappointed, devoted the remainder of his life to poetry and never wrote another novel. Today, the material is far less shocking. Jude Fawley, a poor stone carver with aspirations toward an academic career, is thwarted at every turn and is finally forced to give up his dreams of a university education. He is tricked into an unwise marriage, and when his wife deserts him, he begins a relationship with a free-spirited cousin. With this begins the descent into bleak tragedy as the couple alternately defy and succumb to the pressures of a deeply disapproving society. Hardy's characters have a fascinating ambiguity: they are victimized by a stern moral code, but they are also selfish and weak-willed creatures who bring on much of their own difficulties through their own vacillations and submissions to impulse. The abridgment speeds Jude's fall to considerable dramatic effect, but it also deletes the author's agonizing logic. Instead of the meticulous weaving of Jude's destiny, we get a somewhat incoherent summary that preserves the major plot points but fails to draw us into the tragedy. Michael Pennington reads resonantly and skillfully, his voice perfectly matching the grim music of Hardy's prose, but this recording can only be recommended for larger public libraries.
-John Owen, Advanced Micro Devices, Sunnyvale, CA
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.


Review

Novel by Thomas Hardy, published in 1894-95 in Harper's New Monthly as Hearts Insurgent; published in book form in 1895. Hardy's last work of fiction, Jude the Obscure is also one of his most gloomily fatalistic, depicting the lives of individuals who are trapped by forces beyond their control. Jude Fawley, a poor villager, wants to enter the divinity school at Christminster (Oxford University). Sidetracked by Arabella Donn, an earthy country girl who pretends to be pregnant by him, Jude marries her and is then deserted. He earns a living as a stonemason at Christminster; there he falls in love with his independent-minded cousin, Sue Bridehead. Out of a sense of obligation, Sue marries the schoolmaster Phillotson, who has helped her. Unable to bear living with Phillotson, she returns to live with Jude and eventually bears his children out of wedlock. Their poverty and the weight of society's disapproval begin to take a toll on Sue and Jude; the climax occurs when Jude's son by Arabella hangs Sue and Jude's children and himself. In penance, Sue returns to Phillotson and the church. Jude returns to Arabella and eventually dies miserably. The novel's sexual frankness shocked the public, as did Hardy's criticisms of marriage, the university system, and the church. Hardy was so distressed by its reception that he wrote no more fiction, concentrating solely on his poetry. -- The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
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Product Details

  • Paperback: 336 pages
  • Publisher: Dover Publications (December 1, 2006)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0486452433
  • ISBN-13: 978-0486452432
  • Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.1 x 1 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (140 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.com Sales Rank: #58,447 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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More About the Authors

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Cynthia C. Jones
Cynthia C. Jones
Norman Page
Norman Page
Cedric Thomas Watts
Cedric Thomas Watts
Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy
Patricia Ingham
Patricia Ingham

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50 of 55 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Hardy's Last Novel, March 1, 2000
By C. Gilbert "frumiousb" (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) - See all my reviews
(TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Jude the Obscure (Paperback)
Supposedly, this book was burned by the Bishop of Wakefield when it was first released, and Hardy's wife was furious at him because people would think it was autobiographical. The response to the book was the final nail in the coffin that caused Hardy to stop writing novels.

Jude Hawley is born into a changing world-- a world that's changed enough that a poor boy can dream about a university eduction and a professional future. However, it hadn't changed enough for that dream to yet be realizable. Hawley instead is entrapped into a hasty marriage and sacrifices his dreams of further education. Even after the marriage is dissolved by the wife removing herself to Australia, Jude continues to be haunted for the rest of his life by his early mistake-- dooming himself and his true love to a lifetime of misery.

The book is bleak. The characters (Jude and Sue, primarily) can't live with the choices that law and religion demands, but they can't live outside them either and their attempts to do so only drive them down deeper. The central thesis of the book, and the one that was so shocking a the time, was that these moral and legal strictures prevented people from fulfilling their dreams and living happy lives. Jude the Obscure challenges the sanctity of marriage by building a tragedy about people trapped by its convention.

An important and challenging book. It continues to be relevant today.

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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Dreams deferred, July 19, 2005
This review is from: Jude the Obscure (Signet Classics) (Paperback)
Ready for four hundred pages of sparkle and sunshine? "Jude the Obscure" is about a group of people whose every hope and dream is gradually crushed to a fine powder and blown away by the winds of despair. Hardy is his usual unforgiving self in this grim, discomforting tale of educational goals thwarted, marital bliss destroyed, childhood innocence corrupted, and spiritual redemption viciously mocked. Those who might suspect that this is a recent example of the current cultural debasement of family values would be amazed to know that this novel was written not in 1995 but in 1895. Upon its publication, Hardy was criticized for his pessimism when all he was did was herald the arrival of the pessimistic twentieth century.

"Jude the Obscure" is not an indictment of education, marriage, family, or religion, but rather Hardy's bitter commentary on how society misuses these institutions to defend its shaky beliefs and practices. Jude Fawley, the title character and society's puppet, is a young man trying in vain to transcend his environment. A stonemason by trade, he dauntlessly studies Latin and Greek with the rigorous mind of a classical scholar in preparation for entering the ivy-covered Gothic halls of Christminster, a college town supposed to evoke Oxford. Two things stand in his way: He is too poor to afford the tuition, and he marries an ignorant farm girl named Arabella who discourages his academic aspirations.

Separated from Arabella but still legally married, Jude begins a relationship with his pretty cousin, Sue Bridehead, after he moves to Christminster to be nearer his goal, supporting himself with various stonemasonry jobs. Sue marries Jude's former teacher, Richard Phillotson, many years her senior, also rejected by Christminster and now a local schoolmaster. When Phillotson realizes that Sue's heart belongs to Jude, he sorrowfully but graciously cuts her loose, whereupon she goes to live with her lover. The irony that Hardy emphasizes is that the two couples in the novel who were never meant to be--Jude and Arabella, and Phillotson and Sue--were the ones who married, while Jude and Sue, the only mutually happy couple, are unmarriageable to each other.

Sue is the most interesting, and arguably the most tragic, figure in the novel. At first she appears to be a devout Christian, working in a shop that makes religious ornamentation; but she soon reveals herself to be as cynical as Jude is earnest, acknowledging that she and Jude are descendants of a fractured family for whom marriage seems not to be intended. However, towards the end of the novel her character is transformed by a misfortune so violent and sickening that it has the power to convince her that she is being punished for her sinful ways. A pious person would be probably cheered by choosing conventional morality after such an incident, but Sue, fearful of the wrath of a divine force she can't know or control, is only made more miserable by feeling pressured to accept the undesirable situation of living with her lawful husband.

"Jude the Obscure," even more so than Hardy's other famous novels, is swamped in loneliness, frustration, disillusion, anger, and hopelessness, all delivered by the relentless fist of fate, and it is exhausting to imagine the emotional abysses he would have had to plumb had he decided against all critical opposition to continue this avenue of his career. Hardy, like Jude an autodidact but unlike Jude a professional success nonetheless, is plaintive about a social system that prevents talented people of poverty from realizing their potential while requiring them to live holy lives. His response was to write a book that would shock the public, not to shame them, but into seeing what he saw.

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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Obscurity All the Way Through, November 4, 2005
This review is from: Jude the Obscure (Signet Classics) (Paperback)
He was a poor boy who felt things those around him couldn't feel. He felt pain and compassion towards helpless animals. He levitated while reading books into a charming world of imagination and fantasy; the words that lifted him were the same words others considered boring and complicated. He saw something more, unseen by others, from floating phantasms and phantoms to vivid dreams. Eventually he joined their obscurity, away from the surrounding idle vision and hollow souls.

Thomas Hardy's last novel "Jude the Obscure", tells the story of Jude, a visionary and intellectual orphan growing up with his aunt in the humble town of Marygreen. As we turn the book's five-hundred pages we witness the formulation and maturation of Jude's character and the successive failures and misfortunate events cast upon him.

The adjective "obscure" is not confined to Jude's character; it is rather used repetitively throughout the novel to describe situations, places, circumstances etc... The obscurity manifested in the actions and thoughts of the characters is not part of them, but rather shed upon them from their society and the positions it entitles them to.

Such obscurity comes to light when we observe the constant confusions and internal struggles suffered by both Jude and Sue, his lover, soul-mate and cousin. Jude is shattered between his dreams, intellect, religious faith and animal instinct. At one point of the novel he says "people go on marrying because they can't resist natural forces, although many of them may know perfectly well that they are possibly buying a month's pleasure with a life's discomfort". Jude is shattered between his religious conviction and aspiration of becoming a priest and his human instinct, until at last he decides he was unfit for such vocation and burns all his theological books. At times he regrets reading and studying, as he knows that he would go on being a stone worker, yet his resting hours were always dedicated to his books.

Though from the beginning of the novel an aesthetic dreamer, Jude soon discovers that reality encompasses all dreams, hopes and fantasies. The society denied him all chances of happiness. He had thought that if he couldn't get the education he had longed sought, the presence of Sue beside him would condole, or even obliterate, his great loss, but even Sue was collared from him like his career and efforts.

Towards the end when Sue threatens to leave him after the significant change in her mentality, Jude wonders in rage "Perhaps the world is not illuminated enough for such experiments as ours! Who were we, to think we could act as pioneers." Even though Jude had determination, he wasn't strong enough to contend the multitudinous problems that confronted him and fight long enough for his beliefs.

The other character almost equally important as that of Jude's is Sue Bridehead, his cousin. At the beginning of the novel Jude's aunt makes a brief reference of her as a girl who shared Jude's passion for reading. Then when Jude decides to move to Christminister, his aunt tells him that she happens to be there at well. He takes her picture, which he finds very pretty, searches for her, but despite that never dares to go and tell her about their relation. It was she who took the initiative after discovering that he was her cousin.

Like Jude, Sue has a distinct character which develops and undergoes significant changes.

We see her first as a reckless intellectual who is charmed by -and encourages-men's love to her "Sometimes a woman's love of being loved gets the better of her conscience, and though she is agonized at the thought of treating a man cruelly , she encourages him to love her while she doesn't love him at all" .However she is repugnant by their sexual desire in her. She sent Jude a letter telling him he can love her if he wants, however even after she went to him she didn't like him kissing her a lot "I think I would rather go on living always as lovers, as we are living now, and only meeting by day. It is so much sweeter for the woman at least, and when she is sure of the man". It was only when faced by the seriousness and likeliness of Jude's returning to Arabella that she finally agrees to "go further" and " intensify" her "liking" of him by marriage. Unlike Jude, however, Sue didn't have any feelings for Philloston except those of respect ad friendly love. Her brief marriage to him was unbearable and once she chose to throw herself from the window than to have him touch her.

Faced by the death of her children ,however, Sue finds herself unable to hold to her convictions and she yields to the religious thought of her society leaving Jude behind.

Christminister is the embodiment of mystery. The mystery of dreams. The mystery of time. The mystery of loss. The obscurity of mystery. It is the place that sums up Jude. The place that built him and turned him to an additional edifice of its ancient and glorious architecture. The core of his heart; his Jerusalem; his "centre of the universe".

Arabella and Philloston can be better described as ghosts than as characters. They are the ghosts of past and convention that haunt the freedom of the rebellious couple, following them like shadows so that they look obscure in the eyes of the society. Whether consciously or unconsciously they act with a determination to normalize or destroy them.


The only winner at the end seems to be Arabella. The story unfolds with her preparation for marriage amidst the tragedy of a dead Jude and a dying Sue. She was the one capable to be cruel and heartless for her carnal desires within the limits of accepted tradition and social conventionalism. She could murder a pig in cold blood to eat, and lawfully- yet immorally-entrap a man to marry her for her own comfort, support and protection using virtue and weakness as a justification.

Jude suffered because he pursued his dreams. In his quest of becoming something more and going out of the gloomy conventional track of his society he lost everything-his children, his love, his life. However a sense of mollification underlies the tragic end of the story, for even though Jude dies after a lifetime of suffering, he dies at an early age, before he could live long enough to witness further humiliation and anguish. It is a romantic ending for someone who searched, someone who tried; someone who was pulled back, and abandoned.
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 		 Most Recent Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars Hey Jude
This is classic Thomas Hardy--a likeable hero allows himself to be ruined by the opposite sex and the hard realities of life written in very descriptive, poetic language of bygone... Read more
Published 13 days ago by informednow

1.0 out of 5 stars lazy publisher
The edition of "Jude the Obscure" that I believe you're seeing on this page -- the Signet paperback, with the two horses on the cover -- first came out in '61 and hasn't been... Read more
Published 3 months ago by Caraculiambro

4.0 out of 5 stars Obscure is an understatement
I very much enjoyed the beginning of the novel. However, toward the end, things became a little too dark. Read more
Published 8 months ago by Sabra Hart

3.0 out of 5 stars Sound and Fury
I found the first part of the book to be pretty interesting; here is a nonconformist couple bucking the weight of Victorian mores and standards to live life according to their... Read more
Published 8 months ago by Chuck

3.0 out of 5 stars Weird
This book was okay, as in it kept me reading, and it was sad. However, it reminded me too much Breaking Dawn, fourth book of that dreaded Twilight series. Read more
Published 9 months ago by X. Huang

5.0 out of 5 stars My favorite novel of all time
If there's one strange habit that's become a subtle part of my life it's that I have the hardest times remembering how I came across some of my favorite things, bands, movies,... Read more
Published 10 months ago by Plastic Eggs

4.0 out of 5 stars I enjoyed this book because I sympathized with Jude and really wanted a good life for him
Although Jude The Obscure may see somewhat depressing dark, and gothic I did enjoy the story of the character Jude. Read more
Published 11 months ago by Loran

5.0 out of 5 stars Ahead of its Time
Jude the Obscure is easily one of the best-written stories I have read in a long time. You will probably think Jude and Sue are so weird they are from another planet. Read more
Published 13 months ago by Shadoxfire

5.0 out of 5 stars This is my favorite book -
- ever, ever, ever, ever, ever! I have never felt this intensity of pure love for a person who I'm told is fictional? Read more
Published 14 months ago by Lytton Bell

3.0 out of 5 stars Jude the Obscure: literary shock and awe
Jude Fawley, is an orphan trapped in poverty and a narrow working class paradigm, but in spite of these limitations, he dreams of a scholarly life in the university town of... Read more
Published 18 months ago by Medusa

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