Finished: Jude the Obscure (Hardy). Well, that was depressing! I really enjoyed Hardy's writing when I read The Mayor of Casterbridge, so I was looking forward to reading another. I still enjoyed the writing, but the entire story was just so down-trodden and sad. Not to mention the horrific tragedy that occurs towards the end. :-( I also feel so bad when the protagonist, Jude, who has such lofty goals to study hard and become educated....abandons those dreams after he continually gets waylaid and when he realizes that he'll never be allowed into the university to study.

Jude is a poor stone mason who yearns for knowledge, and to some day graduate from university and even become a church leader. He teaches himself many subjects, but he's never able to live up to his own standards. And, when he gives up his goals, first for one woman, then another, he's doomed from there on out. The first wife, Arabella, tricks him into marriage, makes his life miserable, and then leaves him within the first couple of years. He remains a married man, so when he runs into his cousin, Sue, and falls irreparably in love, there are too many blockades...he is still married, and she is his cousin. Not wanting to compromise her, even though she reciprocates his love, he encourages her to marry an older man. Of course....her marriage is unhappy. She leaves her husband for Jude. Jude and Sue live together out of wedlock. Even when both of their ex-spouses give them divorces, they are too wary of marriage to remarry each other. They adopt Jude's young son by Arabella (who he never knew about until she dumped him on Jude's doorstep at the age of 5 or 6). They proceed to "live in sin" and have two more children, with another on the way. Jude has completely given up all his religious beliefs and desires to teach in the church. Jude and Sue are shunned in every town they attempt to get work due to their unconventional living arrangement. Near poverty, one night young Jude (as they named the adopted son) hears Sue lamenting that perhaps it would sometimes be better if they were all no longer of this earth. Young Jude asks her about that, and rather than ease his mind, she discusses their hardships with him as if he were much older than he was. Feeling that his father and mother would be better off without the children to burden them, he hangs first his infant brother and toddler sister, and then himself. Sue, in her grief, miscarries their next baby. Sue decides that this is God's way of punishing her for her lifestyle. She goes and begs her first husband to take her back. She tells Jude that he should also go back to his first wife...that nothing will be right for either of them until they do. Sue then lives in a loveless marriage. Jude marries Arabella in a drunken stupor, but then dies of consumption (presumedly) at the age of 30. Acckkk...so depressing! :-(

I had read that there was a shocking scene in the book, and I think that was the one with the poor hanged children...very graphic. Not my favorite of books, but I think I still want to read more Hardy. I'll give Tess of the d'Urbervilles a try, I think...but not just yet.