The stonemason Jude Fawley yearns for the university at Christminster but is thwarted by class, an ill-made marriage, and his tragic love for his cousin Sue Bridehead.
Books mentioned in Jude the Obscure (9)
Iliad by Homer: “I have read two books of the _Iliad_, besides being pretty familiar with passages such as the speech of Phoenix in the ninth book, the fight of Hector and Ajax in the fourteenth, the appearance of Achilles unarmed and his heavenly armour in the eighteenth, and the funeral games in the twenty-third.”
Agamemnon by Aeschylus: “It comes in the chorus of the _Agamemnon_.”
Carmen Saeculare by Horace: “being now about sixteen, and had been stumbling through the "Carmen Sæculare," on his way home”
Apologia Pro Vita Sua by John Henry Newman: “Then one of the three enthusiasts he had seen just now, the author of the _Apologia_:”
Epipsychidion by Percy Bysshe Shelley: “Say those pretty lines, then, from Shelley's 'Epipsychidion' as if they meant me!"”
The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe: “…of them all, "in her little white frock, and shoes, and pink sash"; how she recited "Excelsior," "There was a sound of revelry by night," and "The Raven"; how during the delivery she would knit her little brows and glare round tragically, and say to the empty air, as if some real creature…”
Excelsior by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: “…and recitations, she appeared on the platform, the smallest of them all, "in her little white frock, and shoes, and pink sash"; how she recited "Excelsior," "There was a sound of revelry by night," and "The Raven"; how during the delivery she would knit her little brows and glare round…”
Laon and Cythna by Percy Bysshe Shelley: “They remind me of--what are their names--Laon and Cythna.”
Paul and Virginia by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre: “They remind me of--what are their names--Laon and Cythna. Also of Paul and Virginia a little.”
Books that mention Jude the Obscure (6)
The Lost Girl by D. H. Lawrence: “But your Sue now, in Jude the Obscure—is it not an interesting book?”
Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes: “the following works: Pantagruel, Jude the Obscure, Baudelaire's poems, all Kafka, The Snows of Kilimanjaro – and Madame Bovary.”
Babel Tower by A. S. Byatt: “Jude Mason is asked, 'Would I be wrong in suggesting that you chose Jude as a tribute to Thomas Hardy's hero Jude the Obscure?'”
11/22/63 by Stephen King: “Found myself listening to Sadie as she read to me, first Jude the Obscure, then Tess of the D’Urbervilles.”
Books: A Memoir by Larry McMurtry: “bitterness over the treatment of Jude the Obscure caused him to leave fiction and turn to poetry”
The Common Reader: Second Series by Virginia Woolf: “Thus when Jude the Obscure appears or a new volume of Proust, the newspapers are flooded with protests.”