There are parts of this book that will blow you away. Despite the somewhat archaic language in places, it is utterly compelling. Hardy writes about his characters from inside out. You really feel as if you know them. The book flags a bit in the middle, but it's a little bump that's all and if you keep going you'll feel the full force of this great classic. Ultimately, it is a depressing book, because it's about failing, failing in love, failing in life. But you leave this book feeling wiser. A monumental work. Much deserving of its place in the history of literature. This is one book you must read.
As a rule I am not the biggest fan of Hardy. He seems a little provincial for my tastes, but Jude the Obscure, while most certainly provincial is an amazing piece of literature and art.
The story surrounds an orphan whose family are historically libertines (of course libertines in a kind of upright, properly British fashion. There are no Cecile de Volanges, Valmonts, or Mdm. de Merteuils here) and his struggles to fulfill this familial destiny.
As a child, despite his rural poor socio-economic status, he yearns to go to a University. At nights he pours over the classics and mathematics, taking what classes he can at night from the local schoolmaster and buying what books he can with whatever money he can save. Eventually he becomes apprenticed to a stone mason, but not even this can stamp out his intellectual ardor.
Eventually, he takes up the trade he was trained in and marries a young woman from a nearby villiage after he leaves the house of his master. The marriage ends in disaster due to the mixed match of the partners; Jude is the consumate intellectual and she is completly a woman of her class.
After the marriage dissolves, Jude moves to a town which has a large University. He attempts to enroll in the school, but is told by one of the Professors there to mind his own social reponsibilities and not to concern himself with those of his betters (of course the letter is more nicely worded).
In this same town he meets one of his women cousins who is as iconoclastic as he is (She works painting religious icons for a church, but breaks down and buys a Pagan statuette that strikes her aethetic and ideological fancy on a trip to another town, which has to be hidden from the sight of her mistress). Jude begins here a courtship with her that continues even after she marries another man. The result is that they both end up running off together, which causes the two of them to committ adultry according to the English law of the time (Jude's wife left for Australia without first obtaining a divorce).
After hearing of his wife's change of heart, Jude's cousin's husband lets her go. As a result the lives of all three spiral downward into a misery that doesn't have to happen but is forced upon all by their stodgey hidebound countrymen as a result of Jude family's untraditional lifestyle, evinced by Jude constantly relocating his family caused by their unwillingness to be unhappy just because someone else expects it ("(we must go) not because we have wronged any man, but because we have done that which is right in our own hearts"-Jude).
This book is terribly depressing, but a wonderfully effective attack on Hardy's society. The book, in fact, was refused publication in its original form because it attacked the institution of marriage in England. The truth is that it attacks so much more than just marriage and at times seems often to be little more than a catalogue of Jude's failures, despite his pragmatic ambitions, abilities, and interests. The book sees him denied love, knowledge, education, status, wealth, happiness, and much more and merely because he fixed his own star and lived a moral life outside the moral boundaries constructed for him.
Though this may sound like a terrible book to read it is not at all because it is so unbelievably well written, and in the end produces such an emotion in the reader, almost anti-cathartic (if the Greeks ever had such a thing) becuase the main character has so few flaws other than his obstinance regarding what he deserves, that the gloominess of the story is wholly redeemed. It is very rarely that a novelist or author in any medium can create a master piece that speaks to an audience in any generation, but Hardy has done that here with Jude the Obscure if only because it is the opposite of the Horatio Alger story. The boy would've-done good-story. If you want to admire an author's craft, have an emotional experience, or even just read a period piece of late ninteenth century British literature you can not do much better than Jude the Obscure.
