Jude the Obscure is a novel by Thomas Hardy, which began as a magazine serial in December 1894 and was first published in book form in 1895 (though the title page says 1896).

[4] The novel tells the story of Jude Fawley, who lives in a village in southern England (part of Hardy's fictional county of Wessex).

As a youth, Jude teaches himself Classical Greek and Latin in his spare time, while working first in his great-aunt's bakery, with the hope of entering university.

But before he can try to do this the naïve Jude is seduced by Arabella Donn, a rather coarse, morally lax, and superficial local girl who traps him into marriage by pretending to be pregnant.

But, shortly after this, Jude introduces Sue to his former school teacher, Mr. Phillotson, whom she eventually is persuaded to marry, despite the fact that he is some twenty years her senior.

After one final, desperate visit to Sue in freezing weather, Jude becomes seriously ill and dies within the year in Christminster, thwarted in his ambitions both in love and in achieving fame in scholarship.

From the original pairing of Arabella and Jude to their eventual reunion, Hardy depicts marriage as an oppressive social necessity, propelling the characters into a downward spiral of unhappiness.

Although Jude wishes to attend the university at Christminster, he cannot afford the costs involved in studying for a degree, and he lacks the rigorous training necessary to qualify for a fellowship.

This theme of unattainable education was personal for Hardy since he, like Jude, had been unable to afford to study for a degree at Oxford or Cambridge, in spite of his early interest in scholarship and the classics.

Several specific details about Jude's self-directed studies actually appear in Hardy's autobiography, including late-night Latin readings while working full-time as a stonemason and then as an architect.

[9] Another parallel between the book's characters and themes and Hardy's actual life experience occurs when Sue becomes obsessed with religion after previously having been indifferent and even hostile towards it.

[10] Around 1887, Hardy began making notes for a story about a working man's frustrated attempts to attend the university, perhaps inspired in part by the scholastic failure and suicide of his friend Horace Moule.

[11] From December 1894 to November 1895, a bowdlerised version of the novel ran in instalments in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, originally under the title The Simpletons, then Hearts Insurgent.

[13] It has been suggested that negative criticism was the reason that Hardy stopped writing novels after Jude, but poet C. H. Sisson describes this "hypothesis" as "superficial and absurd".