Jude the Obscure

At dusk a stonemason's boy lies in a field and watches the far lights of Christminster come on, the city of scholars and spires he is certain will one day take him in. It never will. Thomas Hardy's last novel is the story of Jude Fawley, who teaches himself Greek and Latin by candle while the university a few miles off keeps its gates shut to the poor, and of Sue Bridehead, the cousin he loves, as quick and contradictory and modern a woman as the century produced. Their refusal to marry on the world's terms, their flight, the slow closing of every door, build toward a scene so terrible Victorian readers begged Hardy to stop. A child leaves a note: Done because we are too menny. Few books have looked so steadily at how cruelly a society can punish wanting more than it was willing to allot you. Hardy never wrote fiction again.