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    Jude the Obscure (MAXNotes Literature Guides)
    Jude the Obscure (MAXNotes Literature Guides)
    Jude the Obscure (MAXNotes Literature Guides)
    Ebook145 pages2 hours

    Jude the Obscure (MAXNotes Literature Guides)

    By Lauren Kalmanson

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    About this ebook

    REA's MAXnotes for Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure MAXnotes offer a fresh look at masterpieces of literature, presented in a lively and interesting fashion. Written by literary experts who currently teach the subject, MAXnotes will enhance your understanding and enjoyment of the work. MAXnotes are designed to stimulate independent thought about the literary work by raising various issues and thought-provoking ideas and questions. MAXnotes cover the essentials of what one should know about each work, including an overall summary, character lists, an explanation and discussion of the plot, the work's historical context, illustrations to convey the mood of the work, and a biography of the author. Each chapter is individually summarized and analyzed, and has study questions and answers.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherResearch & Education Association
    Release dateJan 1, 2013
    ISBN9780738673066
    Jude the Obscure (MAXNotes Literature Guides)

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      Jude the Obscure (MAXNotes Literature Guides) - Lauren Kalmanson

      Guides

      SECTION ONE

      Introduction

      The Life and Works of Thomas Hardy

      Jude the Obscure is the last novel written by Thomas Hardy, an author whose work reflects both his personal life and the intellectual trends of nineteenth-century England. Thomas Hardy was born June 2, 1840 in Higher Bockhampton, Dorset, England. He was the eldest of four children. His father started a successful building and contracting business with an initial stake of only fourteen pounds. His mother was Jemima Hand, who worked as a maidservant and received pauper relief, a sort of welfare program. Thomas Hardy had a complicated attitude toward his family origins. He had a particular interest, common to many born into humble circumstances, in being accepted by upper-class society. Hardy was also convinced that his ancestors had formerly been successful and important but had recently come down in the world.

      The young Thomas was a delicate child who learned to read at about three years of age. He played with the local peasant children as a young boy, but his parents forbade him to use their rural dialect. His mother arranged for his education and tutoring, first at the village school and later at Dorchester Day School.

      His childhood was reasonably happy. Long hours were spent roaming the countryside on his own. His parents encouraged his interests in music and reading. As an adolescent, he became acquainted with the poet William Barnes, who lived in Dorset. Barnes was to have a strong influence on Hardy.

      As a teenager, Hardy taught himself Greek and began to write poetry. He wanted to become a member of the clergy, but his formal education was never advanced enough to qualify him for such a profession. Despite his eventual accomplishments, he felt ashamed of his relative lack of schooling his entire life. Religion also played an important role in Hardy’s early life. Like most of the rural middle class, the Hardys were Anglicans.

      At sixteen, Hardy was apprenticed to a Dorchester architect, John Hicks. In 1862 he left Dorchester for London to work as assistant to the architect Arthur Blomfield. While in London, he developed his intellectual tastes by attending the opera, theatres, and museums, and by reading progressive and skeptical authors such as Charles Darwin, John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, and T. H. Huxley, among others.

      He never attended university, but was tutored during his apprenticeship by a Cambridge student named Horace Moule. Moule’s early death caused Hardy great sadness. Hardy’s lack of a degree always caused him some remorse, though it did not particularly limit his life. He was to meet some of the great intellectual figures of his day, including George Meredith, the novelist who would give him advice on publication.

      In 1867 Hardy returned to Higher Bockhampton, and though his initial writing attempts were poems, his prolific writing career really began with The Poor Man and the Lady, now lost. The Poor Man and the Lady is a story contrasting London and the countryside, which Hardy completed in 1868 at age twenty-eight while working for John Hicks. The influential critic and author George Meredith advised Hardy not to publish the book but encouraged him to write another. The Poor Man and the Lady was rejected by publishers as being too satiric in tone. His second attempt at a novel, Desperate Remedies, was published in 1871 by William Tinsley to mixed reviews.

      Hardy soon decided to concentrate in his novels on what he knew and loved best, the social life of rural southern England. After two moderately successful novels, Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) and A Pair ofblue Eyes (1873), were published anonymously, Hardy scored a significant success in 1874 with Far from the Madding Crowd. After his triumph, he married Emma Lavinia Gifford, whom he had met several years earlier.

      Hardy continued writing novels of Wessex, the historical, Anglo-Saxon name he gave in fiction to his native Dorset, from this time until 1895. Tess of the D’Urbervilles, published in 1891, was immediately popular with the reading public. However it also caused controversy. Victorian moralists and ecclesiastics were scandalized by the author’s contention that his heroine was, in the words of the novel’s subtitle, a morally pure woman. Some readers were outraged by the book’s pessimism, by the unrelieved picture of torment and misery Hardy presented. Orthodox believers in God were scandalized by his suggestions that the beneficent warm God of Christianity seemed absent from the world Hardy depicted.

      After the bitter denunciation of the sexual double standard in Tess, Hardy expanded his satiric attack in his next novel, Jude the Obscure (1895), which criticized the institutions of marriage, the Church, and England’s class system. Again Hardy was savaged by critics who could not countenance his subversiveness. He was attacked in the press as decadent, indecent, and degenerate. Among those offended was his wife, who took the novel as anti-religious, and thus a blow to the devoutness she believed she shared with her husband. Distressed by such small-mindedness, Hardy, now financially secure, vowed to give up novel-writing and return to the composition of poetry, his first literary love, which he felt would afford him greater artistic and intellectual freedom. From 1898 on Hardy published mainly poetry. He became one of the few English authors to produce a significant body of poetry as well as novels.

      Hardy had no children but his marriages were extremely significant factors in his life and can be seen as having a strong effect on his work. He was in love several times and once engaged to a maid named Eliza Nicholls before meeting his first wife. In 1870, he met Emma Gifford on a trip to Cornwall, and married her in 1874. Her family disapproved of the marriage and considered Hardy beneath Emma. Though Hardy loved Emma, the marriage became unhappy, but continued until her death in 1912. Later, Hardy looked back on her with affection.

      Throughout his life, Hardy became infatuated with seemingly unattainable women. While Emma was still alive, he carried on an intense correspondence with Mrs. Florence Henniker, a writer who lived in Dublin. She was to have a great influence on Hardy. Meanwhile, Emma had become fanatically religious and nearly insane. After Emma’s death he married Florence Dugdale, who had been his secretary and literary aide for several years. The second marriage proved happier. Florence Hardy

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