{"product_id":"2026200012866-secondhand-jude-the-obscure","title":"Jude The Obscure","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eCondition remarks:\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBook: Good\u003cbr\u003eJacket: Very good\u003cbr\u003ePages: Good\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn the sunbaked villages and dreaming spires of Victorian England, Jude Fawley — a stonemason of fierce intellect and crushing ambition — reaches desperately toward an Oxford education that his humble birth places forever beyond his grasp. Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure chronicles the tragic arc of a man undone not merely by poverty and class, but by the merciless social codes of an age that punishes those who dare to dream beyond their station. At the heart of the novel burns his unconventional and doomed relationship with his cousin Sue Bridehead, a brilliant, iconoclastic woman whose own rebellion against marriage and religion makes her as much an outcast as Jude himself.\n\nHardy's final novel stands as one of the most searingly honest works of the Victorian era — a savage indictment of a society that worships institutions while destroying individuals. Written with a restrained, almost austere power, Hardy's prose dissects class, marriage, religion, and intellectual aspiration with surgical precision, presenting a vision of human suffering so unflinching that its publication in 1895 scandalized readers and prompted Hardy to abandon novel-writing forever. The epigraph, *The letter killeth,* visible on the title page, signals the novel's central argument: that rigid adherence to law and doctrine crushes the very life it claims to uphold. A masterwork of psychological realism, Jude the Obscure leaves the reader to ask a question that still resonates: what does a society owe to those it refuses to let rise?\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Secondhand Stock","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49203279233243,"sku":"2026200012866-SECONDHAND","price":25.0,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0523\/7646\/9701\/files\/3113a452-a238-4656-8659-2160c6562b63.png?v=1788147379","url":"https:\/\/bookgrocer.com\/products\/2026200012866-secondhand-jude-the-obscure","provider":"Book Grocer","version":"1.0","type":"link"}