Five-minute digest
Jude the Obscure
Summary
Jude Fawley is an orphan boy raised by his great-aunt Drusilla in the downland village of Marygreen. When the schoolmaster Richard Phillotson leaves for the university city of Christminster, Jude fixes his hopes on following him. From a barn roof he sees the far-off lights of the city, which he calls a city of light, and he teaches himself Latin and Greek from secondhand grammars while working as a baker's boy and then as an apprentice stonemason. His plans are first interrupted by Arabella Donn, a pig-breeder's daughter, who draws him into an early marriage on a mistaken claim that she is expecting a child; the marriage soon fails and she sails for Australia. Jude goes to Christminster as a mason, repairing college stonework he cannot enter as a student. There he meets his cousin Sue Bridehead, quick, freethinking and restless, and falls in love with her. A college master answers his letter by advising him to stay in his own trade, and Jude turns instead toward the idea of becoming a country curate. Sue trains as a teacher at Melchester, then marries the much older Phillotson. Finding she cannot bear the marriage, she leaves him with his consent for Jude; Phillotson loses his school post at Shaston for allowing it. Jude and Sue, both later divorced, live together unmarried at Aldbrickham and repeatedly fail to go through with a wedding. Arabella sends Jude their son, a solemn child nicknamed Little Father Time. The family drifts from town to town as Jude takes work where neighbours do not know their history. Returning to Christminster on Remembrance Day, they cannot find lodgings; after Sue tells the boy that another baby is coming, he takes his own life and the lives of the two younger children. Sue, broken by grief and convinced it is a judgment, turns to a strict religious penitence and goes back to remarry Phillotson. Jude, ill and drinking, is drawn back into marriage with Arabella. He walks through rain to see Sue one last time, worsens, and dies alone in Christminster while the college festivities sound outside, repeating Job's curse on the day of his birth. Hardy wrote the novel between 1892 and 1894; it ran in Harper's New Monthly Magazine from December 1894 in a cut and altered form and appeared as a book in 1895 with his Preface restoring the full text. The fierce reviews that followed are often given as one reason he stopped writing novels and turned to poetry. The library text is the Project Gutenberg edition, with Hardy's 1895 Preface and the part epigraphs.
Top Lessons
Longing for learning
Jude's lonely nights with Latin and Greek grammars show a real hunger for knowledge, and the closed gates of Christminster make that hunger the engine of the tragedy. Hardy honours the aspiration even as he records its defeat.
The letter and the spirit
The book's motto from 2 Corinthians, that the letter kills, is quoted by Jude himself near the end. Hardy sets rules of marriage and religious form against inner conviction, and lets characters on each side argue in their own terms.
Two crossings of belief
Jude begins devout and ends doubting; Sue begins sceptical and ends in rigid penitence. Their opposite paths show how grief, guilt and circumstance can reshape conviction.
Suffering and the question of Job
Jude dies speaking the words of Job 3, cursing the day he was born. The novel leaves the reader with Job's question of why the righteous suffer, without the voice from the whirlwind that answers Job in Scripture.
Verified Quotes
“As you got older, and felt yourself to be at the centre of your time, and not at a point in its circumference, as you had felt when you were little, you were seized with a sort of shuddering, he perceived.”
Frequently cited
“It is a city of light”
“the social moulds civilization fits us into have no more relation to our actual shapes than the conventional shapes of the constellations have to the real star-patterns.”
“I am in a chaos of principles—groping in the dark—acting by instinct and not after example.”
“They seem to see all its terrors before they are old enough to have staying power to resist them.”
“We are acting by the letter; and ‘the letter killeth’!”
“Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man-child conceived.”
“to point, without a mincing of words, the tragedy of unfulfilled aims”
Medical Lens
Physician Vilbert is a fine portrait of the itinerant rural quack, selling golden ointment, life-drops, pills and a love-philtre to cottagers beyond the reach of licensed medicine. Little Father Time is described as having a morbid temperament, and the Doctor's comment after the children's deaths echoes fin-de-siècle talk of degeneration and of a new despair in the young; this is the characters' period theory, not a diagnosis the novel endorses. Aunt Drusilla's warning that the Fawleys should not marry hints at a family taint in the heredity language of the day. Jude's drinking at moments of failure, Sue's nervous collapse and penitential self-punishment after the deaths, and Jude's final wasting illness after his walk in the rain give further material. Any modern reading of Sue's or Little Father Time's states is interpretive.
- Part First, Ch. IV
Physician Vilbert, the road-physician, is introduced selling remedies to cottagers and fails to bring Jude the grammars he promised.
- Part Second, Ch. VII
After the college master's rebuff Jude drinks in a Christminster tavern and recites the Creed in Latin to the company.
- Part Sixth, Ch. II
The deaths of the three children at the Christminster lodgings, the boy's note, and the Doctor's theory of children who wish not to live.
- Part Sixth, Ch. II–IV
The premature birth and death of Sue's baby, her conviction of divine judgment, and her penitential return to Phillotson.
- Part Sixth, Ch. X–XI
Jude's final illness after the rainy journey to Marygreen, Vilbert's return at his bedside, and his death alone during the college festivities.