A boy stands in a ploughed field in Wessex, staring toward the spires of Christminster, and dreams of a life of learning his class will never permit. Thomas Hardy published this final novel in 1895, and the outcry was so fierce he never wrote fiction again. Jude Fawley's pilgrimage toward knowledge and love is thwarted by poverty, convention, and institutions that promise liberation but deliver exclusion. Sue Bridehead is one of Victorian fiction's most complex figures, whose flight from the body mirrors the age's uneasy modernity. Hardy stripped away every consolation the novel had traditionally offered. What remains is a sacred fury, a book that grieves for every life broken on the wheel of respectability.