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Books Jude the Obscure

Jude the Obscure is a novel about passion—passion for human and sexual fulfillment, and its agonized frustration at the hands of a society which must everywhere deny it.

Tweet this quote Terry Eagleton New Wessex Edition 1975
It is a tribute to Hardy’s powers that catastrophes on such a scale do not plunge his novels into melodrama or absurdity. Rather, we accept them, as we do in the plays of Sophocles and Shakespeare, as the symbolic casualties inflicted on humanity by a cosmos that is fundamentally cruel.

Tweet this quote Read the full piece at New Yorker Adam Kirsch New Yorker 2007

There may be books more disgusting, more impious as regards human nature, more foul in details, in those dark corners where the amateurs of filth find garbage to their taste; but not, we repeat, from any master’s hand.

Tweet this quote M. O. W. Oliphant Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine 1896

Sue Bridehead is one of Hardy’s greatest creations; a figure both tragic and cruel, a born dissenter subdued only by grief.

— Lily Power