Jude the Obscure is the last of Thomas Hardy’s novels, begun as a magazine serial and first published in book form in 1895. Its hero Jude Fawley is a lower-class young man who dreams of becoming a scholar. The two other main characters are his earthy wife, Arabella, and his intellectual cousin, Sue. Themes include class, scholarship, religion, marriage, and the modernization of thought and society. The British class system, the inaccessibility of education and the coldness of institutional Christianity all come in for biting criticism in Hardy’s final and most tragic novel.