A stonemason who wants Christminster and a degree marries the wrong woman, loves his cousin, and is refused by everything he reaches for. The reviews called it "Jude the Obscene" and a bishop burned it; Hardy said the experience cured him of novel-writing for good, and he published only poetry for the last thirty years of his life. The famous scene in the bedroom of the lodgings is still the hardest page in Victorian fiction, and it is not there for shock. One hundred plates, from Canaletto to Munch, gather the labourers, nurses and ruined towns that Hardy's stonemason moves among.
