> Skip to content
[]
Play sample
  • 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
The Black Tulip
The Lady of the Camellias
Selected Poetry
On Sparta
Man and Superman
Saint Joan
Love
Annals
Military Dispatches

About the author

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy was born in Dorset in 1840 and became an apprentice architect at the age of sixteen. He spent his twenties in London, where he wrote his first poems. In 1867 Hardy returned to his native Dorset, whose rugged landscape was a great source of inspiration for his writing. Between 1871 and 1897 he wrote fourteen novels, including Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure. This final work was received savagely; thereafter Hardy turned away from novels and spent the last thirty year of his life focusing on poetry. He died in 1928.

Also by Thomas Hardy

See all

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
penguin pop image
penguin pop image