My favourite novel too. I have been keeping reading English Literature whenever I could for decades and this novel, together with Tess and Middlemarch, has been a great experience since the first time I read it, and still is. Jude will remain with me for life. Many thanks for your video and for speaking so clear and beautifully. Even a foreigner like me, who can read but has great difficulties in coming to terms with the spoken language, was able to appreciate your speech. Thanks!!
I have a novel that has stuck with me as well. THE GOOD SOLDIER, FORD MADDOX FORD. Have read or listened to it on audible at least 50 times since my first reading in 1970. Had read JUDE about that time. I think now I was too young then to really appreciate it. Though that gruesome scene then became forever etched in my memory. Reading it latter in my life, I saw it so much more clearly. A great work indeed.
“I have understanding as well as you; I am not inferior to you: yea, who knoweth not such things as these?” Jude scrawls the words of Job in chalk on the college wall. Glad to meet someone else who likes Thomas Hardy's novels. I first read this novel when I was in high school, and it had a big impact on me. The reason I remember Jude's biblical allusion is because it took me many years before I got the chance to go to college. But unlike Jude, I did get to go not just to college but graduate school. You know Jude has internal flaws as well. If his fate is due strictly to outside circumstances, that's melodrama. To be tragedy, as Thomas Hardy's novels are, there has to be character flaws, for example, a divided self.
sir can you do more such videos (modern critical appreciation) about his other novels ; may be even his poems and also his short stories which Margaret Drabble says he wrote it with a high degree of skill. I have always felt that he is so underrated as a writer. People easily dismiss him as a pessimist which even his admirers like Virginia Woolf opined of Jude the Obscure. To me he is a great artist and I can't help admiring him year after year even though I am a devout Christian. So close to my heart he is, that his stories and his aura mesmerizes whenever I read him. My humble tribute to this poetic genius. Wow I love Hardy ! (from India)
I have read this book! I was slack-jawed with what Little Father Time did to his siblings. He was thinking he and his younger siblings were the reasons why Jude and Sue couldn't find a lodging.
Funny story about my experience with this novel: I was talking with a buddy of mine one day about the novel Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy. He then started talking about how similar that sounded to this book he had read, Jude the Obscure. He wasn't sure who wrote it though. So we looked it up. Imagine our surprise. (He later gave me the book for Christmas).
I have the David Austin rose "Jude the Obscure" it is the most beautiful and sweet smelling rose. Now that I have heard your narration I have to read the book. Thank you for this great video!
Thank you so much , you described it very well , even you could explain it batter then the professors of colleges ,this vedio could be treasure to a needed one student
Thank you for the wonderful review, I've just finished watching the BBC adaptation for the second time about 20 years between the first and second time. The novel is next.
What a wonderful commentary, thanks! Just happened to search for such a commentary in case I could compare/contrast my impressions with another--lo and behold, nothing to contrast at all, agree with every good point you make. In particular, three points: 1.) that a large part of Hardy's genius is his “not shying away from the miseries of life” (this one's tough for many readers--I have a friend who HATES Hardy for this, particularly Jude for what he calls 'Hardy's tendency to drag his characters through the worst experiences' [to which I reply internally, 'uh, yeah, such is life right?'--i.e., not Hardy's tendency but life's/nature's, Hardy just has an uncommonly accurate sense of it all]); 2.) That a crucial theme of Jude is how “Somebody idealistic [and deeply, sensitively intelligent] can be dragged down by mediocrity” (HUGE theme of many of Hardy's works--in particular here, how social/religious conventions, all of them creations of mediocre souls, can crush beautiful souls); 3.) that Jude is Hardy's best book (could write an essay on this--it's just so; I think you could argue that Jude nails for Hardy his most precious pet themes, in a way that Tess and Mayor Casterbridge [for example] come close but fall short of nailing--more to this point, I think it explains why Hardy gave up after Jude, he knew he could not better the book as an achievement through long-form fiction). All again to say, thanks kindred spirit, happy to subscribe! (Sorry if this is repeating several other comments, can't read them all!)
Besides the French Classics, we have the British ones to go through. Though think we all have read Wuthering Heights (liked it a lot, it's an impressive and unforgettable reading), Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre (also excellent), Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray (an incredibly good and clever one), and then Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure. A terrible reading. Even if Hardy's Tess D'Uberville is even harder and a desperatingly sad one, Jude the Obscure remains for me a great, excellent realistic book. Of course, among the British Classics one can't forget DH Lawrence main and very catching and good novels. And then I have to mention Arnold Benett's The Clayhangers. A saga that caught me and had me hanging around with, till I finished it. But the Jude story is an important book about poverty and unfortunate love, a really dramatic story. It also has to see with Religion and Social Classes. Besides, it is all dyed with pessimistic feelings of a world that's perceived as unable to become a better one, rid of all these barriers. This kind of belief in a fate you can't escape of, is something my own father shared a bit. He had that, deep within him. As told, more or less, Thomas Hardy's other books are this way, as well. Although being the picture he paints as real as it is, his books become part of the ones we can't avoid reading. It's hard to have to know our world was this way, when you're only a teen. Anycase, Dickens already foretell us about our world as it was. Think his Bleak House is one we have to read. His gothic three last ones are the ones to be read. But at the same time, it's a good thing to know this was our reality. An excellent book as some others of this author. Among the British Classics, Thomas Hardy is a capital reading. 💎❤️👍🆗🙏
Thank you for your review. Having a failed marriage behind me I was indeed moved to sadness at the decline and eventual break-up between Jude and Arabella. The earlier description of the death of the poor pig was so heart-rending. This book stands apart from most of my readings within almost all of my nearly eighty years. I cannot imagine how I missed it. Best wishes.Michael/Leicester/UK
I see some of you folk are thinking about taking up Thomas Hardy. I would recommend THE WOODLANDERS as good point of beginning. JUDE is a bit thick for a first time reader. It circles so around the key relationship a bit much. However the last half is very gripping. THE NATIVE is a very difficult read but well worth the price of admission. I love Hardy however Madding he may be.
Other reviewer of quality literature include this novel as an overlooked masterpiece. I have only read Far From The Madding Crowd. I reread several portions because of Hardy’s beautiful command of written English. His references to nature , the stars, the various animals is poetic. When folks discuss Hardy they seems to ignore his syntax. I’m not so interested in whether Hardy’s novels qualify as a perfect, balance with structure and character development . From this perspective, I would be interested in reading Jude the Obscure just to have a look at his later writing style.
The story is very depressing...but shows what good contraception does...prevents ''too many'' children in cases of poverty. ''Done because we are too many'' ...and people just do keep churning out kids even in 21st century, despite not being able to care for them properly.
also - this novel is the working out of Darwinism! Hardy basically uses themes and characters as vehicles to express that character and environment are totally fixed. So we see Judes lovely, slightly weak character set up against a harsh new world that has grown out of old engand and we know that he is going to fail in life. Unlike Arabella who is practical and manipulative, so she's going to succeed in this world that Hardy has set up. Essentially, survival of the fittest!
Arabella tells Jude she is pregnant when she is knows she is not that is how she tricks him into marrying him. Then after they are married one night as they prepare for bed she confesses she is not pregnant.
I really enjoyed your review. I read Jude the obscure a long number of years ago and saw the BBC series and the film. Is it set in the 1890s? As far as I know Hardy's books were set in the 1840 up to 1860s. Do you think the 1840s were a bit more liberal than the 1890s? Like Dickens when he wrote it was more of the Regency style when there were a lot more fops etc around. As the Victorian period went on it got more strict. I can see the difference in the 1840s and the 1890s. When people say the Victorian era they have the one impression. But from the start in 1837 until the end in 1901 i feel it was much different from the start. Dickens himself did not see himself as Victorian but more Regency. Am I correct in saying that Jude is about the later Victorian period. Very well done again and thank you.
It's been a long time and I wasnt so knowledgeable back when but the fact that Jude was a stone mason should stand out as a very important point considering the more esoteric as well as financial and political aspects of free masonry--servile masonry juxtaposed against philosophical masonry. If the book was questioning value systems, the nature and will of the divine, the structure of society etc etc is is very clear that in order to really understand the book you need to understand the principles of free masonry. just my two cents.
I love Thomas Hardy. "Jude the Obscure" is really moralistic. I got a little frustrated with Jude and Sues' perpetual back and forth. It had me feeling similarly as I had when I'd reached a point in D.H. Lawrence's "Sons and Lovers" which is another novel by an author I adore. I still believe "Return of the Native" is my favorite Thomas Hardy work. However, they're all good. I like that Thomas Hardy writes some about ancient Roman artifacts/architecture. In the novel "The Mayor of Casterbridge" I'm so mortified when he writes of the skimmity ride! Although I know it to be his personal taste and style, I can't help feeling the event of Jude and Sues' bereavement is some kind of editor's or agent's or friend's advice tending towards sensationalism. Also, this novel made me sexually frustrated.
On A level syllabus? Why would 80% of teenagers want to read this? How does is resonant with a teenage audience. Social exclusion perhaps but it is certainly not an A level text. So many better suited books
VDUO Not pretty much off answer by the way, she's indeed a cruel heartless thot -____- it took me minutes wondering in disbelief at how she could left the already-dead Jude, LIKE THAT. Lord goodness.
My favourite novel too. I have been keeping reading English Literature whenever I could for decades and this novel, together with Tess and Middlemarch, has been a great experience since the first time I read it, and still is. Jude will remain with me for life. Many thanks for your video and for speaking so clear and beautifully. Even a foreigner like me, who can read but has great difficulties in coming to terms with the spoken language, was able to appreciate your speech. Thanks!!
I have a novel that has stuck with me as well. THE GOOD SOLDIER, FORD MADDOX FORD. Have read or listened to it on audible at least 50 times since my first reading in 1970. Had read JUDE about that time. I think now I was too young then to really appreciate it. Though that gruesome scene then became forever etched in my memory. Reading it latter in my life, I saw it so much more clearly. A great work indeed.
Yes, it sticks with you.
All souls crushed, except for Arabella.
I was left feeling like I'd been kicked in the gut.
“I have understanding as well as you; I am not inferior to you: yea, who knoweth not such things as these?” Jude scrawls the words of Job in chalk on the college wall. Glad to meet someone else who likes Thomas Hardy's novels. I first read this novel when I was in high school, and it had a big impact on me. The reason I remember Jude's biblical allusion is because it took me many years before I got the chance to go to college. But unlike Jude, I did get to go not just to college but graduate school. You know Jude has internal flaws as well. If his fate is due strictly to outside circumstances, that's melodrama. To be tragedy, as Thomas Hardy's novels are, there has to be character flaws, for example, a divided self.
sir can you do more such videos (modern critical appreciation) about his other novels ; may be even his poems and also his short stories which Margaret Drabble says he wrote it with a high degree of skill. I have always felt that he is so underrated as a writer. People easily dismiss him as a pessimist which even his admirers like Virginia Woolf opined of Jude the Obscure. To me he is a great artist and I can't help admiring him year after year even though I am a devout Christian. So close to my heart he is, that his stories and his aura mesmerizes whenever I read him. My humble tribute to this poetic genius. Wow I love Hardy ! (from India)
I have read this book! I was slack-jawed with what Little Father Time did to his siblings. He was thinking he and his younger siblings were the reasons why Jude and Sue couldn't find a lodging.
The
Funny story about my experience with this novel: I was talking with a buddy of mine one day about the novel Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy. He then started talking about how similar that sounded to this book he had read, Jude the Obscure. He wasn't sure who wrote it though. So we looked it up. Imagine our surprise. (He later gave me the book for Christmas).
good gift
I have the David Austin rose "Jude the Obscure" it is the most beautiful and sweet smelling rose. Now that I have heard your narration I have to read the book. Thank you for this great video!
Thank you so much , you described it very well , even you could explain it batter then the professors of colleges ,this vedio could be treasure to a needed one student
i really need to start reading some Hardy. I love classics and i love tragic stories so he should be right up my alley .
Tess of the D'Urbervilles....very good, but tragic tale.
He's right up your alley. Tbat is, heaven right around the corner.
Thank you for the wonderful review, I've just finished watching the BBC adaptation for the second time about 20 years between the first and second time. The novel is next.
What a wonderful commentary, thanks! Just happened to search for such a commentary in case I could compare/contrast my impressions with another--lo and behold, nothing to contrast at all, agree with every good point you make. In particular, three points: 1.) that a large part of Hardy's genius is his “not shying away from the miseries of life” (this one's tough for many readers--I have a friend who HATES Hardy for this, particularly Jude for what he calls 'Hardy's tendency to drag his characters through the worst experiences' [to which I reply internally, 'uh, yeah, such is life right?'--i.e., not Hardy's tendency but life's/nature's, Hardy just has an uncommonly accurate sense of it all]); 2.) That a crucial theme of Jude is how “Somebody idealistic [and deeply, sensitively intelligent] can be dragged down by mediocrity” (HUGE theme of many of Hardy's works--in particular here, how social/religious conventions, all of them creations of mediocre souls, can crush beautiful souls); 3.) that Jude is Hardy's best book (could write an essay on this--it's just so; I think you could argue that Jude nails for Hardy his most precious pet themes, in a way that Tess and Mayor Casterbridge [for example] come close but fall short of nailing--more to this point, I think it explains why Hardy gave up after Jude, he knew he could not better the book as an achievement through long-form fiction). All again to say, thanks kindred spirit, happy to subscribe! (Sorry if this is repeating several other comments, can't read them all!)
This book sounds incredible! Now at the very top of my "Must Read" list. Thank you for this video!
Besides the French Classics, we have the British ones to go through. Though think we all have read Wuthering Heights (liked it a lot, it's an impressive and unforgettable reading), Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre (also excellent), Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray (an incredibly good and clever one), and then Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure. A terrible reading. Even if Hardy's Tess D'Uberville is even harder and a desperatingly sad one, Jude the Obscure remains for me a great, excellent realistic book. Of course, among the British Classics one can't forget DH Lawrence main and very catching and good novels. And then I have to mention Arnold Benett's The Clayhangers. A saga that caught me and had me hanging around with, till I finished it. But the Jude story is an important book about poverty and unfortunate love, a really dramatic story. It also has to see with Religion and Social Classes. Besides, it is all dyed with pessimistic feelings of a world that's perceived as unable to become a better one, rid of all these barriers. This kind of belief in a fate you can't escape of, is something my own father shared a bit. He had that, deep within him. As told, more or less, Thomas Hardy's other books are this way, as well. Although being the picture he paints as real as it is, his books become part of the ones we can't avoid reading. It's hard to have to know our world was this way, when you're only a teen. Anycase, Dickens already foretell us about our world as it was. Think his Bleak House is one we have to read. His gothic three last ones are the ones to be read. But at the same time, it's a good thing to know this was our reality. An excellent book as some others of this author. Among the British Classics, Thomas Hardy is a capital reading. 💎❤️👍🆗🙏
Thank you for your review. Having a failed marriage behind me I was indeed moved to sadness at the decline and eventual break-up between Jude and Arabella. The earlier description of the death of the poor pig was so heart-rending. This book stands apart from most of my readings within almost all of my nearly eighty years. I cannot imagine how I missed it. Best wishes.Michael/Leicester/UK
Thank you so much. Your.review is very inspirational and clear. You definately should post more review videos on books. Would love to watch!!!
I see some of you folk are thinking about taking up Thomas Hardy. I would recommend THE WOODLANDERS as good point of beginning. JUDE is a bit
thick for a first time reader. It circles so around the key relationship a bit much.
However the last half is very gripping. THE NATIVE is a very difficult read but well worth the price of admission. I love Hardy however Madding he may be.
Other reviewer of quality literature include this novel as an overlooked masterpiece. I have only read Far From The Madding Crowd. I reread several portions because of Hardy’s beautiful command of written English. His references to nature , the stars, the various animals is poetic. When folks discuss Hardy they seems to ignore his syntax. I’m not so interested in whether Hardy’s novels qualify as a perfect, balance with structure and character development . From this perspective, I would be interested in reading Jude the Obscure just to have a look at his later writing style.
The story is very depressing...but shows what good contraception does...prevents ''too many'' children in cases of poverty. ''Done because we are too many'' ...and people just do keep churning out kids even in 21st century, despite not being able to care for them properly.
also - this novel is the working out of Darwinism! Hardy basically uses themes and characters as vehicles to express that character and environment are totally fixed. So we see Judes lovely, slightly weak character set up against a harsh new world that has grown out of old engand and we know that he is going to fail in life. Unlike Arabella who is practical and manipulative, so she's going to succeed in this world that Hardy has set up. Essentially, survival of the fittest!
As far as we know, all the main characters had precisely 0 reproductive offspring. Nature, and society, selected none of them.
Awesome.
Arabella tells Jude she is pregnant when she is knows she is not that is how she tricks him into marrying him. Then after they are married one night as they prepare for bed she confesses she is not pregnant.
Thanks for the video... I would never read it if you didn't highlight the virtues of this book.
I really enjoyed your review. I read Jude the obscure a long number of years ago and saw the BBC series and the film. Is it set in the 1890s? As far as I know Hardy's books were set in the 1840 up to 1860s. Do you think the 1840s were a bit more liberal than the 1890s? Like Dickens when he wrote it was more of the Regency style when there were a lot more fops etc around. As the Victorian period went on it got more strict. I can see the difference in the 1840s and the 1890s. When people say the Victorian era they have the one impression. But from the start in 1837 until the end in 1901 i feel it was much different from the start. Dickens himself did not see himself as Victorian but more Regency. Am I correct in saying that Jude is about the later Victorian period. Very well done again and thank you.
It's been a long time and I wasnt so knowledgeable back when but the fact that Jude was a stone mason should stand out as a very important point considering the more esoteric as well as financial and political aspects of free masonry--servile masonry juxtaposed against philosophical masonry. If the book was questioning value systems, the nature and will of the divine, the structure of society etc etc is is very clear that in order to really understand the book you need to understand the principles of free masonry. just my two cents.
thank you.
What are the aspect that showed jude the obscure is a modern novel? Plz your answers
I love Thomas Hardy. "Jude the Obscure" is really moralistic. I got a little frustrated with Jude and Sues' perpetual back and forth. It had me feeling similarly as I had when I'd reached a point in D.H. Lawrence's "Sons and Lovers" which is another novel by an author I adore. I still believe "Return of the Native" is my favorite Thomas Hardy work. However, they're all good. I like that Thomas Hardy writes some about ancient Roman artifacts/architecture. In the novel "The Mayor of Casterbridge" I'm so mortified when he writes of the skimmity ride! Although I know it to be his personal taste and style, I can't help feeling the event of Jude and Sues' bereavement is some kind of editor's or agent's or friend's advice tending towards sensationalism. Also, this novel made me sexually frustrated.
Hardy's father and grandfather were masons, so the main character seems based very much on the background of his own life.
i wanted to buy that book.. but couldnt find it here in morocco.. is there is any way to buy it by internet.. thx i really need if for university
O sang Park kayeen f virgin store
💜💜💜💜💜💜
On A level syllabus? Why would 80% of teenagers want to read this? How does is resonant with a teenage audience. Social exclusion perhaps but it is certainly not an A level text. So many better suited books
Where did Arabella finish up in life.
VDUO Not pretty much off answer by the way, she's indeed a cruel heartless thot -____- it took me minutes wondering in disbelief at how she could left the already-dead Jude, LIKE THAT. Lord goodness.
dun because we were too many
because his "word
'transcended meaning... lol call it changing the def of.......
does it do a man good to put himself out of place with his mates?
no
no wonder i know that mouth lol