Jude the Obscure (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) by Thomas Hardy Read Free Book Online Page A

opening up of the field of novelistic representation, which would include what the novelist is allowed to describe, including the most intimate disclosures possible: what, for instance, in James Joyce’s Ulysses, Leopold Bloom reads as he defecates or Molly Bloom fantasizes about with her lover.
    One way, finally, to begin the novel Jude the Obscure is to think hard about its title. We have considered how it echoes the sound of classical tragedies such as Oedipus the King, but its range of allusion is broader than this would imply. The Epistle of Jude, which Hardy had read and made notes on in his version of the Bible, is here invoked; whether Saint Jude, traditionally understood as the saint of hopeless causes, is in part behind the choice of Jude’s name is at least a defensible interpretation. But perhaps the most enigmatic aspect of the novel’s title is its title page, with its epigraph: “The letter killeth.” The phrase is a quotation from 2 Corinthians 3:6: “Who also hath made us able ministers of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.” Saint Paul goes on to explain this as a distinction between the Spirit and the Letter of the Law, the meaning of which has been much debated, but which has generally been understood as Paul’s critique of a legalistic adherence to Christianity.
    By citing part of the phrase, “the letter killeth,” Hardy invites the reader to consider what the letter of the law means and how it might kill. Since one of the primary ways that the novel engages law is through the marriage law, a reader would do well to start there, and ask: Does strict adherence to the law of marriage kill? The Divorce Act of 1857 had ensured the right of a civil divorce, so Hardy probably was not limiting his critique to the actual law itself, but perhaps was pursuing the more complicated question of how social conventions or religious belief could produce what he called “a good foundation for the fable of a tragedy” The question of how “the letter killeth,” and what the nature of Jude’s tragedy was, is perhaps the novel’s largest question—the pursuit of which will take the reader deep into the novel, and deep into the intellectual and emotional issues that ensure a place for Jude the Obscure among the greatest English novels.
     
    Amy M. King is Assistant Professor of English at St. John’s University in New York City, and is the author of Bloom: The Botanical Vernacular in the English Nove l (Oxford University Press, 2003), as well as articles on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature and culture. King received her doctorate in English and American Literature and Language from Harvard University in 1998.

 

    Map of Wessex, prepared by Hardy in 1895.

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
    The history of this novel (whose birth in its present shape has been much retarded by the necessities of periodical publication) is briefly as follows. The scheme was jotted down in 1890, from notes made in 1887 and onwards, some of the circumstances being suggested by the death of a woman in the former year. The scenes were revisited in October 1892; the narrative was written in outline in 1892 and the spring of 1893, and at full length, as it now appears, from August 1893 onwards into the next year; the whole, with the exception of a few chapters, being in the hands of the publisher by the end of 1894. It was begun as a serial story in Harper’s Magazine at the end of November 1894, and was continued in monthly parts.
    But, as in the case of Tess of the d’Urbervilles, the magazine version was for various reasons an abridged and modified one, the present edition being the first in which the whole appears as originally written. And in the difficulty of coming to an early decision in the matter of a title, the tale was issued under a provisional name, two such titles having, in fact, been successively adopted. The present and