Thomas Hardy’s final novel, Jude the Obscure (1895), was ahead of its time in more ways that one. Upon its publication, it provoked controversy with its explicit criticism of organised religion and traditional marriage, leading to book burnings and public criticism.
Hardy attributed the public criticism to his retirement from novel writing. He had already courted controversy in the literary establishment a few years earlier by describing the unmarried mother who (spoiler alert) goes on to commit murder at the centre of Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) as “a pure woman”. But Jude the Obscure was his most searing attack yet on the hypocrisies of late Victorian society.
The novel’s apparent endorsement of free love, and damning portrait of conventional marriage, alienated many readers including – perhaps unsurprisingly – Hardy’s wife, with whom the novel caused an irreparable breach.
