Jude the Obscure: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Sources, Crit
by Thomas Hardy
Category: Adultery

Jude Fawley is a bright but impoverished stonemason who aspires to attend university and become a scholar. H is failure to fulfill the expectations of the two women he loves points to his final tragedy. Concerned with the destructive conventions of marriage and the English class system, Jude the Obscure is a raging indictment of Victorian society; the censure of this insightful book was almost without precedent in the history of English literature.