SOURCE: "Hardy's Sue Bridehead", in Nineteenth Century Fiction, University of California Press, Vol. 20, No. 4, 1966, pp. 307-23.

In the following essay, Heilman examines Hardy's complex portrayal of the character of Sue Bridehead, calling it "an imaginative feat" that expresses Hardy's perception of modern human reality.

In Jude the Obscure, a novel in which skillful characterization eventually wins the day over laborious editorializing, Thomas Hardy comes close to genius in the portrayal of Sue Bridehead. Sue takes the book away from the title character, because she is stronger, more complex, and more significant, and because her contradictory impulses, creating a spontaneous air of the inexplicable and even the mysterious, are dramatized with extraordinary fullness and concreteness, and with hardly a word of interpretation or admonishment by the author. To say this is to say that as a character she has taken off on her own, sped far away from a...