Jude the Obscure

Jude the Obscure is a novel written by Thomas Hardy and originally published in 1895.

Jude Fawley is a working-class young man who works in the fields but has a dream: to enter university. In this story, which spans from the age of ten to his thirties we will see how, despite the effort and self-taught study of young Jude, his dreams go awry when he is forced to marry Arabella and how that marriage does not last long.

Later, however, he will meet his cousin Sue Bridehead. She is a free-thinking and sensitive woman who will upend Jude's worldview and will make him fall in love with her...

The novel is very critical of the Victorian society of the time, criticizing social conventions and showing how complicated it was for a person without resources to study a university degree.

"The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry. The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and horse to carry his goods to the city of his destination, about twenty miles off, such a vehicle proving of quite sufficient size for the departing teacher’s effects."