106.Ĭedric Watts, ‘Hardy’s Sue Bridehead and the “New Woman” ’, Critical Survey, 5: 2 (1993), p. Gail Cunningham, The New Woman and the Victorian Novel (New York: Harper & Row London: Macmillan, 1978), p. Katharine Rogers, ‘Women in Thomas Hardy’, Centennial Review, p.

Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (New York: Doubleday, 1970 London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1971), pp. 189–90.Įdmund Gosse, ‘Mr Hardy’s New Novel’, St janzes’ s Gazette, 8 November 1895, p. See Lucas, The Literature of Change: Studies in the Nineteenth Century Provincial Novel (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1977 rev. John Lucas is surely forgetting all these marginal women in the novel when he asserts that ‘we would need more in the way of women than the novel actually gives us’ before we can decide whether Sue is a ‘representative woman’ or simply a ‘pathological case’. Simpson, ‘Sue Bridehead Revisited’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 19 (1991), p. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.Īnne B. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. 2 Thus, the story strikes a balance between being an eloquent plea on behalf of deserving but deprived students who fail to make it to the University, and offering an unsentimental critique of the selfish pursuit of academic ambition. While Hardy’s sympathies evidently went out to the two brothers in their ‘untutored reading of Greek and Latin’, he was alive to the possibility that even the noblest intellectual aspiration could be both corrupt and corrupting. In this neglected short story Hardy portrays the struggles and frustrations of two brothers, Joshua and Cornelius, whose academic aspirations are thwarted by a combination of meagre financial resources, class prejudice, and family circumstances in the shape of a feckless and drunken father. Suicide.’ 1 But before working out this idea fully in a novel-length study, Hardy rehearsed it in a short story, ‘A Tragedy of Two Ambitions’ (1888).

Hardy’s novels sometimes had a long gestation period, and the embryo of Jude the Obscure (1895) is often traced to a note Hardy jotted down in April 1888: ‘A short story of a young man - “who could not go to Oxford” - His struggles and ultimate failure.

Jude and obscure