Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy

I hadn't read any Thomas Hardy since I was halfway through Far from the Madding Crowd in SYS English when I was 18. I only got halfway through because I chucked a hissy fit and left school after my English teacher cornered my mother at a parent's evening (she was there for my sister) and told her all about my preference for sitting in the prefect's room playing cards than attending class and doing homework. Oh, those glory, glory days!

Anyway, I never felt the urge to go back and finish what I'd started in English class until years back my lovely mother-in-law gave me a collection of Hardy novels from her own library and asked if I'd read them one day. It only took me 6-7 years but I picked up Jude the Obscure, this week.

Jude the Obscure is the story of Jude Fawley, a young Victorian stomemason who dreams of a university education to take him into higher spheres of life. He is trapped into marriage at a young age by Arabella who soon deserts him before he meets the love of his life, Sue, his cousin and all-round whack-job. After Jude has his dreams of education scuppered by the snobs at the universities and having fallen hoplessly in love with each other, Jude and Sue decide against marriage, even though both are divorced from their previous spouses. But, they live as a married couple with their children and the child of Jude's marriage to Arabella. As you can imagine, this doesn't go down well with the Victorian Gossips who eventually make life unbearable for the family and tragedy ensues. I think it's a well known fact that Jude the Obscure is not for lovers of the happy ending.

I was a little daunted by the prospect of reading this book since I wanted to read the introduction by Dennis Taylor before getting stuck into the story. My heart sank as I discovered the introduction was making almost no sense so I just decided to cast the introduction aside and just started reading. I was very surprised at just how readable this classic novel is. It's well paced and the characters are all very interesting. I enjoyed the olde Wessex dialect in the dialogue as well as the whole idea of Hardy's fictional Wessex, a part of England that I'm familiar with. It was an enjoyable read.

Actually, I shouldn't say enjoyable, perhaps, more compelling. I knew, as I read, that Jude and Sue were eventually going to become victims of tragedy but I wasn't at all prepared for the magnitude of the tragedy that befell them. I thought perhaps one of them would fall foul of the galloping consumption and the children would end up in the poorhouse. Silly, naive me; it was far more tragic than that! I've since read that this was Hardy's last and angriest novel. He stopped writing novels after the extreme negative reaction to Jude the Obscure. Perhaps he needed to stop writing for fear of a nervous breakdown; his anger and disappointment with society was almost tangible and poor old Jude bore the brunt of it. In this book, Hardy rails against marriage, God, the church, society's expectations of the classes, it's not a happy book by any stretch of the imagination, but it was well worth reading.

And just quickly, I also read that some of the events in this book are semi-autobiographical which didn't impress his wife at all, afraid that she would be confused with the scandalous characters of Sue and Arabella. I find the idea of one of England's most well-regarded writers getting a good old ear-bashing from the missus because of something he wrote highly amusing.