Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Margaret Oliphant

Critical Essay by Margaret Oliphant

SOURCE: A review of Jude the Obscure, in Thomas Hardy and His Readers: A Selection of Contemporary Reviews, edited with a commentary by Laurence Lerner and John Holmstrom, Barnes and Noble Publishers, 1968, pp. 126-30.

In the following excerpt from a review originally published in Blackwood's Magazine in January 1896, Oliphant describes Jude the Obscure "as an assault on the stronghold of marriage."

The Anti-marriage League

[The] inclination towards the treatment of subjects hitherto considered immoral or contrary to good manners, in the widest sense of the words—and the disposition to place what is called the Sex-question above all others as the theme of fiction—has gradually acquired the importance of a parti pris. It may be said that this question has always been the leading subject of romance; but this never in the sense of the words as now used. Love has been the subject of romance, and all the obstacles that have...
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