Jude the Obscure

The stonemason Jude Fawley dreams of the university, but poverty, class and a doomed love for his free-thinking cousin Sue Bridehead break every hope, in Hardy's bleakest and most controversial novel. It maps his Wessex, drawn from real country: the village of his boyhood, the closed golden city of Christminster that will not have him, and the cathedral towns where he and Sue try and fail to live outside the rules.

Jude

Marygreen

The dream

In the village of Marygreen, the orphan boy Jude teaches himself Latin and Greek at his work, fixing his whole soul on the distant, glowing towers of Christminster and a scholar's life. Hardy opens on the poor boy's hunger for learning, the aspiration that class and chance will spend the rest of the book crushing.

The opening chapters

inspired by Jude's boyhood village of Marygreen is drawn from Fawley in Berkshire, from which Hardy took the character's surname; sited in that region of his Wessex.

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