Jude resumes his studies, and makes up his mind to go to Christminster where a cousin of his, Sue Bridehead, a young school teacher, is living too. The couple have frequent quarrels, and finally Arabella abandons Jude, and emigrates to Australia. While working as a stonemason to support himself and pursue his studies, Jude falls in love with a coarse, lusty and vulgar peasant girl, Arabella Donn, who entraps him into marrying her. However, he continues his studies while working as a helping hand in the bakery of his great-grandaunt, Drussila Fawley. But he is refused to get admission there on grounds of being a boy with an obscure family-background. The novel tells the story of an orphaned village-lad of South Wessex, Jude Fawley, who, under the inspiration provided by his teacher at Marygreen, Richard Phillotson, gets interested in studies and learning, and wants to join the University at Christminster. In Richard Carpenter's opinion, "The last novel Hardy wrote is also his most modern, turning away as it does from agricultural setting and pastoral myth to a restless world of cities and psychological insecurities." Unlike other major novels, which are set against a rural background Jude the Obscure has an urban background for its setting. This storm swept Hardy off his feet in the field of novel-writing, and he turned him towards that of poetry.
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