Jude the Obscure Lesson Plan

Thomas Hardy published Jude the Obscure, his fourteenth novel, in 1895. The novel initially ran as a magazine serial in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, and was released as a book later that same year. Although Hardy enjoyed a fair bit of success with his previous novel, Jude proved to be a scandalous release, due to its (relatively) overt sexual content and brazen critiques of Christianity and marriage. The response was so strong, in fact, that the Bishop of Wakefield publicly burned copies of the novel, and several libraries pulled it from their shelves, which severely limited its readership. Hardy himself was so devastated by Jude's reception that he gave up writing prose fiction...