Jude the obscure
(Book)

Includes bibliographical references (pages 439-440).

"Nothing so coarsely indecent as the whole history of Jude in his relations with his wife Arabella has ever been put in English print," asserted M. O. W. Oliphant, the Scottish humorist. Hardy's "Jude the Obscure--the ill-received novel that was to be his last--is a strikingly modern portrait of provincial, workaday life, frank sexuality, and the desire to transcend the mire of prosaic living. Amy M. King is Assistant Professor of Literature at the California Institute of Technology, and the author of "Bloom: The Botanical Vernacular in the English Novel, forthcoming from Oxford University Press. King received her doctorate in English and American Literature and Language from Harvard University in 1998.