Jude the Obscure

This book, exploring some of Hardy's ideas of marriage and class relationships, was infamous when first published - widely denounced and sometimes burned.  Hardy said that the attacks "completely cured me of further interest in novel-writing" (though he had apparently been thinking of turning almost exclusively to poetry anyway).

Two themes are dominant - the idea that the legally-binding nature of marriage destroys true love and friendship, and that the inaccessibility of university life and learning to those of lower class is ill-founded and destructive.  Jude Fawley, a thoughtful, sensitive, fair-minded person with ambitions to intellectual attainment is the hapless victim of a scheming woman who, once they are married, quickly abandons him.  Jude later falls passionately in love with his cousin Sue, who he believes is his soul-mate - a free-thinking, courageous, independent woman.  Jude is a good man with a strong moral sense, a fiercely independent thinker, with advanced but sensible and kind ideals, and with unwavering devotion to Sue.  Unfortunately, as Jude recognizes, Sue is "a fool! - And she's an angel, too, poor dear!"  Eventually, they live together as man and wife, but without formalizing their "marriage".  The novel is the story of how this highly unorthodox relationship leads to their ruin:

To indulge one's instinctive and uncontrolled sense of justice and right, was not, he had found, permitted with impunity in an old civilization like ours.  It was necessary to act under an acquired and artificial sense of the same, if you wished to enjoy an average share of comfort and honour; and to let loving-kindness take care of itself.

This is a strong, interesting and thoughtful book.  I greatly admired Jude and was absorbed in the exploration of his personality and outlook, but for me, the oversensitive and indecisive Sue was an especially maddening character. Though shocking at the time of its publication, dramatic changes in society have robbed the story of a great deal of its power.