Jude the Obscure
A stonemason teaches himself Latin and Greek and walks to the city of colleges hoping to be admitted, and the university never answers him. Hardy's last novel is about the distance between wanting an education and being allowed to have one, and it is also about a marriage market that punishes both people in it.
The book was attacked on publication for its treatment of sex and religion, and Hardy stopped writing novels afterwards. It is not a comfortable read, and the final sections are among the darkest in English fiction. The anger is not decorative; it is aimed at institutions that still exist in some form.
Public-domain status
First published in 1895. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Thomas Hardy died in 1928, so this work has been free to republish there since 1999.
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