Hardy's 1895 final novel following Jude Fawley — a stonemason's apprentice who dreams of attending Christminster University, is trapped by marriage, and sees every aspiration crushed — ending with the suicide of Jude's son Father Time and Jude's own death, causing a public outcry that led Hardy to abandon novel writing.
Represents the culmination of Hardy's tragic vision — the impossibility of individual aspiration against social constraint, the cruelty of institutions to those they were supposedly designed to serve, and the child's instinctive understanding of hopelessness — making it the most psychologically dark Victorian novel.
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