Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) was regarded as the greatest living English novelist during his lifetime. He gave up novel-writing after Jude the Obscure (1895) because the novel's pessimism and sympathetic portrayal of a man and woman who have children out of wedlock outraged the majority of magazine reviewers at the time. Actually, though Hardy attacks narrow puritanical morality, he still endorses traditional family life and religious values. Hardy was a nonbeliever clinging to Christianity, and a lonely man from humble origins who was obsessed with the status he had gained through marriage to an upper-class woman who introduced him to society. Nevertheless, the marriage was unhappy because Emma Hardy could not sympathize with her husband's artistic aims, and he consoled himself by having romantic friendships with other women. The personal aspects of his life may well be the basis of his attack in Jude on society's sexual codes and customs, his interest in the liberated new woman, and his attempts to idealize in Jude and Sue a love that is passionate without being sexual. In this, the first full-length study of Jude the Obscure, Gary Adelman examines the author's ambivalence towards middle-class values. He provides a variety of approaches, including Freudian, Marxist, and feminist readings of the novel. Jude the A Paradise of Despair is an important study which places the novel in the context of Hardy's life and art, as well as in the history of the time, and includes seven illustrations from the first edition of the book.