“ Nothing so coarsely indecent as the whole history of Jude in his relations with his wife Arabella has ever been put in English print” asserted M. O. W. Oliphant, the Scottish humorist. Hardy’ s "Jude the Obscure"— the ill-received novel that was to be his last— is a strikingly modern portrait of provincial, workaday life, frank sexuality, and the desire to transcend the mire of prosaic living.