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Jude the Obscure is a novel written by Thomas Hardy, an English author remembered for his writings of a declining rural society through his writings such as Under the Greenwood Tree, A Pair of Blue Eyes, The Mayor of Casterbridge and Desperate Remedies.
The novel narrates how a conservative society victimizing a village stonemason and his children life on the account of living together without marriage. Jude Fawley yearns to be scholar, works in his aunt’s bakery while teaching himself Latin and Greek. He has been persuaded to marriage by Arabella Donn, a superficial girl who distances him after two years. After their breakup, she gives birth to a child, who has been named in the novel as “Little Father Time”. His birth is not known to Jude initially.
Jude moves to another city for pursuing his education and meets his cousin Sue Bridehead. He introduces her to his old school master Mr. Phillotson. As time passes Phillotson and Sue gets married in peculiar circumstances. However Sue still loves Jude and leaves Phillotson. Jude and Sue live together without marriage and over the years they have two children.
The society does not accept their living together lifestyle and Jude has been dismissed by his employer. The family goes through hard times. Meanwhile “Little Father Time” becomes a socially-troubled boy in frustration kills his half-siblings and hangs himself. In the preceding incidents Sue leaves Jude and remarries Phillotson duly supported by Arabella, who wishes Jude back to her. Cursed by Sue’s decision to leave him, he accepts the inevitable reunion with Arabella, but dies within a year of illness. His death does not cause any trouble to Arabella, she is on her way to the next suitor.
PREFACE
The history of this novel (whose birth in its present shape has been much retarded by the necessities of periodical publication) is briefly as follows. The scheme was jotted down in 1890, from notes made in 1887 and onward, some of the circumstances being suggested by the death of a woman in the former year. The scenes were revisited in October, 1892; the narrative was written in outline in 1892 and the spring of 1893, and at full length, as it now appears, from August, 1893, onward into the next year; the whole, with the exception of a few chapters, being in the hands of the publisher by the end of 1894. It was begun as a serial story in H
ARPER’S
M
AGAZINE
at the end of November, 1894, and was continued in monthly parts.
But, as in the case of
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
, the magazine version was, for various reasons, abridged and modified in some degree, the present edition being the first in which the whole appears as originally written. And in the difficulty of coming to an early decision in the matter of a title, the tale was issued under a provisional name—two such titles having, in fact, been successively adopted. The present and final title, deemed on the whole the best, was one of the earliest thought of.
For a novel addressed by a man to men and women of full age, which attempts to deal unaffectedly with the fret and fever, derision and disaster, that may press in the wake of the strongest passion known to humanity, and to point, without a mincing of words, the tragedy of unfulfilled aims, I am not aware that there is anything in the handling to which exception can be taken.
Like former productions of this pen,
Jude the Obscure
is simply an endeavor to give shape and coherence to a series of seemings, or personal impressions, the question of their consistency or their discordance, of their permanence or their transitoriness, being regarded as not of the first moment.
T.H.
August
, 1895.
Part First
AT MARYGREEN
“Yea, many there be that have run out of their wits for women, and become servants for their sakes. Many also have perished, have erred, and sinned, for women… O ye men, how can it be but women should be strong, seeing they do thus?”
—E
SDRAS
.
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