Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy — Bibliomancer edition cover
Read free online

Free to read online. No account needed.

Fiction · 1895

Jude the Obscure

Thomas Hardy

Reading time
about 10.5 h
Length
145,694 words · 294 pages
Structure
53 chapters · 1 front-matter section
Language
English
Era
Victorian

Jude Fawley is a working-class stonemason who teaches himself Latin and Greek by lamplight, dreaming of studying at Christminster — Hardy's version of Oxford, a city whose colleges he can see gleaming from the surrounding countryside but is never quite allowed to enter. A disastrous early marriage to Arabella Donn derails him first; his cousin Sue Bridehead, freethinking and evasive, derails him more permanently, in a relationship neither of them will formalize even after both leave marriages to be together. Hardy follows Jude and Sue through poverty, social exclusion, and a final catastrophe involving Jude's strange, solemn son by Arabella, known only as Little Father Time, that remains one of the bleakest scenes in Victorian fiction. It is Hardy's angriest novel, aimed directly at the era's marriage laws and its university system's contempt for anyone without money or connections.

It ran as a censored, heavily altered serial in Harper's New Monthly Magazine from December 1894, and was restored to what Hardy intended and published complete in November 1895, London: Osgood, McIlvaine & Co. The reception was savage enough — one bishop reportedly burned his copy — that Hardy never wrote another novel.

Bibliomancer restores the 1895 text exactly as Hardy wrote it.

Contents

  1. Preface
  2. Part First — At Marygreen
  3. I
  4. II
  5. III
  6. IV
  7. V
  8. VI
  9. VII
  10. VIII
  11. IX
  12. X
  13. XI
  14. Part Second — At Christminster
  15. I
  16. II
  17. III
  18. IV
  19. V
  20. VI
  21. VII
  22. Part Third — At Melchester
  23. I
  24. II
  25. III
  26. IV
  27. V
  28. VI
  29. VII
  30. VIII
  31. IX
  32. X
  33. Part Fourth — At Shaston
  34. I
  35. II
  36. III
  37. IV
  38. V
  39. VI
  40. Part Fifth — At Aldbrickham and Elsewhere
  41. I
  42. II
  43. III
  44. IV
  45. V
  46. VI
  47. VII
  48. VIII
  49. Part Sixth — At Christminster Again
  50. I
  51. II
  52. III
  53. IV
  54. V
  55. VI
  56. VII
  57. VIII
  58. IX
  59. X
  60. XI

New editions

Never lose your place.

This book is free to read in full, and stays that way. Leave an address: one click confirms it and opens a free account, so your progress and bookmarks sync across every device. You'll also hear when the next restored edition enters the archive. Terminate at any time.

Confirming opens a free account under the terms and privacy policy.

About this edition

The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.

Source mind

About the author

Thomas Hardy

1840–1928 · Victorian

Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) was born near Dorchester, trained as an architect, and turned to fiction in his thirties. Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Return of the Native (1878), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895) are set in the “Wessex” he mapped onto the south-west of England. After the reception of Jude he wrote no more novels and devoted his last thirty years to poetry, publishing eight volumes and the verse drama The Dynasts.

Adjacent records

If you enjoy Jude the Obscure

Open the archive