Jude the Obscure Thomas Hardy - Havelock Ellis (essay date 1896)

Havelock Ellis (essay date 1896)

SOURCE: A review of Jude the Obscure, in Thomas Hardy and His Readers: A Selection of Contemporary Reviews, edited with a commentary by Laurence Lerner and John Holmstrom, Barnes and Noble Publishers, 1968, pp. 138-44.

[In the following excerpted review, originally published in The Savoy in October 1896, Ellis calls Jude the Obscure "a singularly fine piece of art," adding "this book, it is said, is immoral, and indecent as well. So are most of our great novels."]

… Your wholesome-minded novelist knows that the life of a pure-natured Englishwoman after marriage is, as Taine said, mainly that of a very broody hen, a series of merely physiological processes with which he, as a novelist, has no further concern.

But in novels, as in life, one comes at length to realize that marriage is not necessarily either a grave, or a convent gate, or a hen's nest, that though the conditions...

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