Jude the Obscure

After disastrous first marriages, Jude Fawley and Sue Bridehead find love which Sue is reluctant to tarnish by marriage, a decision for which society cruelly marginalises them. Through the doomed trajectory of their lives, Hardy sympathetically explores the fault lines in Victorian attitudes to marriage and in the couple's vain attempts to sustain their 'highest and purest love'. --Rachel Redford, The Oldie

Sexually innocent Jude Fawley is trapped into marriage by seductive Arabella Donn, but their union is an unhappy one and Arabella leaves him. Jude's welcome freedom allows him to pursue his obsession with his pretty cousin Sue Bridehead, a brilliant, charismatic free-thinker who would be his ideal soul-mate if not for her aversion to physical love. When Jude and Sue decide to lead their lives outside marriage they bring down on themselves all the force of a repressive society. This fearless and outspoken story caused a furore on its publication, and was Hardy's last novel.