She explains, “I altered my old one by cutting up all the Epistles and Gospels into separate brochures, beginning the book with Romans, following on with the early Epistles, and putting the Gospels much further on….

Sue is not religious but she says, “Jude, won’t you let me make you a new New Testament, like the one I made for myself…?” After the dons reject Jude as a classics student, he is furious and tells Sue he has decided to study divinity. Another autodidact, she is more intellectual than Jude she lived chastely in London for more than a year with an undergraduate. The reader is as relieved as Jude.Īnd so Jude moves to Christminster, where he is dazzled by the architecture, the proximity of scholars, and his charming cousin, Sue Bridehead, a brilliant, irreverent woman who drudges as an artist in an ecclesiastical warehouse. Soon she is so bored with him that she immigrates to Australia. Jude is furious when he learns that he has been tricked, but insensitive Arabella laughs.

He is entrapped by a farmer’s daughter, the crude, heartless Arabella, who makes dimples in her face by sucking in her cheeks and feigns pregnancy so Jude will marry her. And, as an adult, he is sure that Phillotson has become a famous minister.Īnd then sex gets in Jude’s way. An autodidact, Jude plans carefully: he becomes a stonemason’s apprentice to support his future education. Jude struggles alone over the Greek and Latin grammars and texts, without the teaching that would facilitate the task. Phillotson, will have a pivotal role in Jude’s life: his decision to leave the village and move to Christminster in the hope of getting a university education inspires Jude with the same hope. In the opening sentence, Hardy marks the difficulty of 11-year-old Jude’s task: “The schoolmaster was leaving the village and everybody seemed sorry.” From the beginning, the reader empathizes with Jude’s longing for a classical education. Lawrence, surely one of the most banned writers of the 20th century, who considered Hardy the greatest – possibly the only great – 19th-century English writer, and whose cadences echo Hardy’s, especially in Women in Love.Īnd Jude is one of Hardy’s most sympathetic heroes.

Like his characters Jude Fawley and Sue Bridehead, who are driven out of an elite university town because they are unmarried lovers living together, Hardy, a married man who wrote about flouting marital conventions, had no refuge – except in poetry.

Thomas hardy novel the obscure