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Books Like Jude the Obscure
Tragic Literary Novels Like Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure is the great novel of thwarted aspiration — a self-educated stonemason destroyed by universities that will not have him and a marriage system he cannot escape. These 8 novels share its ferocity toward institutions, its working-class seriousness, and its refusal to let anyone escape their circumstances.
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Tess of the d'Urbervilles
by Thomas Hardy
A poor Dorset girl destroyed by the Victorian double standard — the companion Hardy novel and the most direct comparison; where Jude is destroyed by class and the marriage system in his role as an aspiring man, Tess is destroyed by the same marriage system in her role as a fallen woman; Hardy was making the same argument through two characters who experience different but complementary versions of the injustice
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Sons and Lovers
by D.H. Lawrence
Paul Morel growing up in a Nottinghamshire mining family, torn between his mother's possessive love and his desire for independence — Lawrence's autobiographical novel is the Modernist successor to Jude the Obscure in its portrait of a working-class young man whose intelligence exceeds his social position and who is destroyed by intimate emotional entanglements as much as by class barriers
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The Way of All Flesh
by Samuel Butler
Ernest Pontifex's rebellion against the Victorian family and religious establishment that have imprisoned him — Butler's posthumously published novel (written 1873–1884, published 1903) shares Jude's ferocity toward Victorian institutions and its sense that the respectable family is the primary mechanism of spiritual destruction; the satire is darker and funnier than Hardy's tragedy
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North and South
by Elizabeth Gaskell
Margaret Hale and the mill owner Thornton in the industrial north — Gaskell's novel shares Jude the Obscure's engagement with the class barriers of Victorian England and its interest in the ways that intelligence and character are distributed across classes rather than concentrated in the educated elite; where Hardy is tragic, Gaskell is more hopeful
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A Room with a View
by E.M. Forster
Lucy Honeychurch liberated from conventional Edwardian expectation by her experience in Florence — Forster's novel shares Jude the Obscure's interest in social conventions as forms of imprisonment, though Forster's conclusion is optimistic where Hardy's is devastating; the obvious companion for readers who want Jude's territory without its unrelenting tragedy
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Of Human Bondage
by W. Somerset Maugham
Philip Carey's painful education through art school, medicine, and a destructive obsession with a waitress — Maugham's autobiographical novel shares Jude the Obscure's pitiless portrait of a young man trying to transcend his circumstances and repeatedly failed by his own temperament and by a society indifferent to his aspirations; less polemical than Hardy but equally honest
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Never Let Me Go
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy grow up in an English boarding school whose purpose they gradually understand — Ishiguro's novel shares Jude the Obscure's interest in people who are educated to want things the society around them has determined they cannot have, and in the devastation of coming to understand that there is no escape from what you were made for
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The Mayor of Casterbridge
by Thomas Hardy
Michael Henchard sells his wife and daughter at a fair while drunk and spends his life trying to atone — Hardy's companion tragedy, more concentrated than Jude and focused on a single self-destructive man; the two novels together show Hardy's range in tragic fiction: Jude is destroyed by what was done to him, Henchard by what he did; both end the same way
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