Jude the Obscure

Jude the Obscure the last completed of Thomas Hardys novels began as a magazine serial in December 1894 and was first published in book form in 1895. Its protagonist Jude Fawley is a working-class young man a stonemason who dreams of becoming a scholar. The other main character is his cousin Sue Bridehead who is also his central love interest. The novel is concerned in particular with issues of class education religion and marriage. The novel tells the story of Jude Fawley who lives in a village in southern England (part of Hardys fictional county of Wessex) who yearns to be a scholar at Christminster a city modelled on Oxford. As a youth Jude teaches himself Classical Greek and Latin in his spare time while working first in his great-aunts bakery with the hope of entering university. But before he can try to do this the naïve Jude is seduced by Arabella Donn a rather coarse and superficial local girl who traps him into marriage by pretending to be pregnant. The