Jude the Obscure - Softcover

Hardy, Thomas

3.83

71,756 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140431314 ISBN 13: 9780140431315

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 1998

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Physical description; 510 p. Includes glossary. "First published 1896. Published in the Penguin English Library 1978." 1984 reprint. Series; Penguin English library. Summary; Novel tracing Jude Fawley's life from his aspirations of intellectual freedom to his early death. Review: I was a teenager when I read this book. There was something about Hardy's harsh, fatalistic world that appealed to me then. Despite, or maybe because of, the pessimism, I think I found it rather romantic and I read everything of his that I could lay my hands on. Then I got to Jude. And Jude was just so sad, so unfair, so much about fate shafting a good man in all kinds of ways, that I overdosed on Hardy and could never read him again. But I still remember sitting on my bed and crying my heart out at the injustice of it all. I cried so much my mother came upstairs to check I was all right. I think she was worried about a teenage excess of emotion. Maybe that was what I liked about Hardy all along: you can shamelessly feel as you read him. (Kirkus UK) Subjects; General & literary fiction ; Classic fiction. FICTION / Classics. Fiction in English.

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Book Description:

Thomas Hardy's last novel charts the life of Jude Fawley from his parochial childhood to his death in the collegiate city of Christminster, the centre of his intellectual dreams and their failure. Initially published as a much-abridged serial, the text first appeared in its full and present form in 1895.

From the Publisher:

In 1895 Hardy's final novel, the great tale of Jude The Obscure, sent shockwaves of indignation rolling across Victorian England. Hardy had dared to write frankly about sexuality and to indict the institutions of marriage, education, and religion. But he had, in fact, created a deeply moral work. The stonemason Jude Fawley is a dreamer; his is a tragedy of unfulfilled aims. With his tantalizing cousin Sue Bridehead, the last and most extraordinary of Hardy's heroines, Jude takes on the world--and discovers, tragically, its brutal indifference. The most powerful expression of Hardy's philosophy, and a profound exploration of man's essential loneliness, Jude The Obscure is a great and beautiful book. "His style touches sublimity."--T.S. Eliot

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