<p>THOMAS HARDY: JUDE THE OBSCURE</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>Edited by Margaret Elvy</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>A new edition of Thomas Hardy&rsquo;s last novel Jude the Obscure 1895), a sister (or brother) book to Tess of the d&#39;Urbervilles (1891), before the author turned to poetry and other forms of writing. Thomas Hardy attacks similar targets as he did in Tess: the family, politics, religion, marriage, education and sexuality. Hardy was on fire when he wrote Jude the Obscure - it is a very angry work.&nbsp;</p><p>Jude the Obscure contains far more polemic and philosophizing than Tess or any of Thomas Hardy&rsquo;s earlier novels. The preaching and polemic threatens to undo the narrative, which is nevertheless &#39;realist&#39;, like other Thomas Hardy fictions.&nbsp;</p><p>In Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy was stretching the novel to the limit, testing the boundaries of what is &#39;acceptable&#39;. In Jude the Obscure, the things that say &#39;you shan&#39;t&#39; are, variously, God, religion, education, circumstance, chance, nature, and marriage. All of the institutions and &#39;causes&#39; reside inside the individual, which is what makes the problems they create so difficult to deal with for Sue and Jude. Patriarchy, culture and society are not in some &#39;out there&#39; space, but in people. Hardy&#39;s thoughts on Jude the Obscure, as expressed in the Life and letters, include his desire for a novel about characters &#39;into whose souls the iron has entered&#39;; a desire to make the story &#39;grimy&#39; in order to heighten the contrast between the ideal life and the &#39;squalid real life&#39;; the novel &#39;makes for morality&#39;, Hardy said; and ended up &#39;a mass of imperfections&#39;, a remark many artists have made of their work.&nbsp;</p><p>Includes illustrations, an introduction, bibliography and notes. Paperback.&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>