Penguin Classics: Jude the Obscure

Jude Fawley, the stonemason excluded not by his wits but by poverty from the privileged world of Christminster, finds fulfilment in his relationship with Sue Bridehead. Both have left earlier marriages. Ironically, when tragedy tests their union it is Sue, the modern emancipated woman, who proves unequal to the challenge. Hardy's fearless exploration of sexual and social relationships and his radical critique of marriage scandalised the late Victorian establishment and marked the end of his career as a novelist. He then turned to poetry, having created in his last heroine, Sue Bridehead, an extraordinary complex woman, an English Emma Bovary or Anna Karenin. This new Penguin Classics edition reprints the unbowdlerized first volume edition of 1895 of Jude the Obscure together with Hardy's 'Postscript' of 1912.