What a depressing story this was. I hated each and every characters in this book with a passion and I hated the society that they were in. Jude's a sad old bastard whose dream of being a scholar was thwarted by his lack of money (a situation that's unfortunately all too common even until now. gatekeeping education and making it so unattainable to the poor? where did i hear about that before???). He married an abusive and manipulative woman, Arabella, who later left him to Australia and married another man, asked Jude to divorce her, then left her one and only child to his care. And even worse, Jude fell in love with his cousin, Sue Bridehead, who happens to be the OG manic pixie dream girl, btw. What in the name of sweet home Alabama is this?! And I would honestly be even more sympathetic to their circumstances if they weren't cousin and if they were both weren't complete stubborn and selfish idiots. I get their aversion to marriage, but at the end of the day they DID already spent their days as 'husband-and-wife' and had multiple children. The only thing that they refused to do was to actually get married and get that goddamn marriage certificate. It's the idiocy, this naive view of how society works and how they just don't seem to comprehend how the society would treat them if they don't just conform to the thing that they're already doing anyway that did it for me. I just simply?? don't fucking get it. Think of the children!!!
With that being said, this book did not give me any happiness whatsoever, it was hard to read at times because I knew that it would only get worse, hence why it took me about a week to finish. All in all I had no complaint about the writing itself, but the theme and the characters really made me angry.