Jude the Obscure

The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry. The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and horse to carry his goods to the city of his destination, about twenty miles off.

Six-part tragedy of thwarted aspiration: Marygreen/Phillotson → Christminster rejection → Arabella marriage → Sue Bridehead cousin-love → Phillotson divorce scandal → children and Little Father Time's catastrophe → Jude's death alone, so plot scores 90.

Tears rose into the boy's eyes, for he was not among the regular day scholars, who came unromantically close to the schoolmaster's life, but one who had attended the night school only during the present teacher's term of office.

Jude Fawley the stonemason-scholar, Sue Bridehead the intellectual New Woman who cannot sustain freedom, Arabella Donn the earthy first wife, Phillotson the decent schoolmaster who releases Sue, Little Father Time the child who enacts the tragedy — sharply individuated within Hardy's Wessex moral universe, so cast scores 88.

The next noteworthy move in Jude's life was that in which he appeared gliding steadily onward through a dusky landscape of some three years' later leafage than had graced his courtship of Arabella, and the disruption of his coarse conjugal life with her.

Part-based episodic structure — each section a distinct phase with time jumps — moves steadily but without the continuous acceleration of a single-volume plot; some elisions are narratively efficient but dramaturgically thin, so pace scores 80.

To point, without a mincing of words, the tragedy of unfulfilled aims, I am not aware that there is anything in the handling to which exception can be taken.

Hardy's austere lyricism — the Marygreen opening, the Christminster vistas, the stonemason's Latin texts — fuses landscape and moral condition; dialect and classical quotation coexist without strain, so prose scores 92.

The master had remarked that even if he got it into the cart he should not know what to do with it on his arrival at Christminster, the city he was bound for, since he was only going into temporary lodgings just at present.

Marygreen village, Christminster (Oxford) as unreachable city of light, Melchester, Aldbrickham, the Wessex roads and stonemason's yards — a moral geography of class barriers, so world scores 90.

The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry. The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and horse to carry his goods to the city of his destination.

Part First opens quietly — the departing schoolmaster, the boy watching — establishing longing before conflict; the hook is accumulative rather than explosive, so hook scores 82.

Sue and Jude were living in Aldbrickham, in precisely the same relations that they had established between themselves when she left Shaston to join him the year before. The proceedings in the law-courts were a distant sound.

The marriage-institution critique ('the letter killeth') and the obscured protagonist — a working-class scholar denied the university — made the novel so controversial it ended Hardy's fiction career, so innov scores 92.

"Did he forgive her?" "Not as I know." "Well—poor little thing, 'tis to be believed she's found forgiveness somewhere! She said she had found peace!"

Jude dead alone on Remembrance Day, Arabella at the window, Sue broken into religious penance, the classical texts on the shelf — one of the bleakest and most formally complete endings in English fiction, so ending scores 94.