Desperate for a gentleman's education, the romantic Jude Fawley finds his life destroyed by the tensions created by these ambitions as well as by his disastrous relationships with two women. Hardy's powerful prose opera, which courageously exposed Victorian society, remains as disturbing as it was on publication in 1895. Marriage, divorce, religion and a variety of personal freedoms and social hypocrisies dominate the lives of the protagonists. As ever in Hardy's fiction, fate is central to the story. Jude's clan is not good at marriage and he proves no exception. Fawley is presented as a flawed and hopelessly human individual and Sue Bridehead is an extraordinarily complex creation at the mercy of her intelligence, confusions, needs and destructive morality.
By Eileen Battersby