Poet and critic A. Alvarez, in an afterword for the 1961 edition of Jude the Obscure, comments on its public reception in an effort to articulate what for many readers is a central riddle surrounding this narrative, that it is among the best novels Thomas Hardy ever wrote and one of the indispensable books in late nineteenthcentury British fiction. Yet with its completion Hardy ceased to regard himself as a novelist and devoted his remaining thirty-two years to poetry and drama.

Alvarez writes that the novel "provoked an outcry as noisy as that which recently greeted [D. H. Lawrence's] Lady Chatterly's Lover (1928; see separate entry). The press attacked in a pack, lady reviewers became hysterical, and a bishop solemnly burnt the book." Full-scale biographical and critical studies confirm the hue and cry Hardy's novel raised in both Great Britain and America. Carl Weber mentions that one Mrs...