Jude the Obscure

Jude Fawley, a young stonemason in a Wessex village, teaches himself Latin and Greek and dreams of studying at Christminster, a city modelled on Oxford. The colleges ignore him, an early marriage to Arabella traps him, and his deep love for his free-thinking cousin Sue Bridehead puts them both outside respectable society, with tragic consequences.

Published in 1895, the novel was attacked so fiercely for its criticism of marriage, class and religion that Hardy gave up writing novels and spent the rest of his life writing poetry. It is his darkest book and one of his most powerful; read Tess of the d'Urbervilles first.

Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) was the son of a stonemason in a Dorset hamlet and trained as an architect, restoring country churches. His novels, set in the imaginary region of Wessex, began with modest success, and Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) allowed him to write full time.

After the storm of criticism over Jude the Obscure in 1895 he gave up novels for poetry and wrote some of the best English poems of the twentieth century, many of them about his first wife Emma after her death. His ashes were buried in Westminster Abbey and his heart in his home parish.