When Thomas Hardy wrote his final novel, Jude the Obscure, a reader wonders what may have been going through his head. After writing Tess of the d’Urbervilles, which shocked the Victorian England countryside, Hardy released Jude in 1895 in a serialized format. While Jude was a hit, it was also breathtakingly scandalous, earning the nickname “Jude the Obscene” and causing some booksellers to sell copies of certain sections in brown paper bags. Hardy, dismayed by the reception of his novels, turned to poetry and never wrote fiction again.

As local kid Jude Fawley grows into a young adult, he is endlessly troubled by the out-of-reach world of academic and pastoral splendor that he can never truly attain, due to a lack of ability, privilege, and knowledge (it is, after all, a rare accident to learn the wrong kind of Latin, even in the 1800s, but Jude manages to mess up even that). As Jude moves through his life, he is haunted and taunted by his first wife, Arabella, who is a true mismatch for Jude, and his beloved cousin Sue, who has Jude’s heart. When Sue announces her marriage to local schoolmaster Phillotson, Jude takes things into his own hands, with utterly disastrous results.

In Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy describes a world on the brink of change; he skewers the Victorian noble institutions of marriage, religion, parenthood, feminism, sexuality and family, but it’s his youngest named character, Young Father Time (or as Jess calls him, “Creepy Baby Man Child”), who pushes Jude—both the character and the book—over the deep end and into the melodramatic, scandalous, messy abyss.

Even in 2021, Hardy’s themes are still revolutionary, including his portrayal of Sue, who is perhaps the earliest fictional character to reflect a type of asexuality, an unexpected and in some cases radical acceptance of divorce, and the shocking act of familicide. As the end of the Victorian era licked at Hardy’s heels, he described a new world where things don’t have to be exactly what they’ve always been—and maybe that’s not a completely bad thing. The people weren’t ready for Hardy, and even now there’s plenty to find scandalous about Jude the Obscure, but it’s also a deeply influential, powerfully told story, and in this episode, we’re breaking down Hardy’s lasting power, the rapture with which we obsess over serialized stories, and what we hope you’ll read next.