The actual definition of 'Hardy's Wessex' varied widely throughout Hardy's career, and was not definitively settled until after he retired from writing novels. In an 1895 preface to the 1874 novel Far From the Madding Crowd he described Wessex as 'a merely realistic dream country'. For example, Hardy's home town of Dorchester is called Casterbridge in his books, notably in The Mayor of Casterbridge. Although the places that appear in his novels actually exist, in many cases he gave the place a fictional name. Hardy named the area 'Wessex' after the medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom that existed in this part of that country prior to the unification of England by Æthelstan. Thomas Hardy's Wessex is the fictional literary landscape created by the English author Thomas Hardy as the setting for his major novels, located in the south and southwest of England. GradeSaver, 30 November 2012 Web.Locations in Wessex, from The Wessex of Thomas Hardy by Bertram Windle, 1902, based on correspondence with Hardy (Slack) Next Section Jude the Obscure Summary Buy Study Guide How To Cite in MLA Format Lind, Abigail. In 1912, Macmillan published the definitive Wessex editions of Hardy's novels, and this edition of Jude the Obscure is the one that is usually read today. When Jude was published in America in Harper's Magazine, most of the controversial elements were removed, and through the 1920s, copies of the unbowdlerized text were extremely hard to find in the United States furthermore, complete texts were expensive. In the years following the book's 1895 release, it became very difficult to obtain uncensored copies of the novel, especially outside of Great Britain.

Hardy received hate mail from all over the world, and was so devastated by the novel's reception that he gave up prose fiction entirely, writing only poetry and drama for the rest of his life. The Bishop of Wakefield publicly burned copies of the book, and several circulating libraries pulled the novel from their shelves - a move that severely limited the book's readership, since many at this time procured their reading material from libraries. Similarly, Jude the Obscure scandalized critics and readers with its sexual content and scathing critiques of Christianity and marriage. Hardy's previous novels and short stories had been extremely popular, with the exception of Tess of the d'Urbervilles, which caused some mild controversy due to its relatively explicit sexual content. It was released in book form in November of that year. Thomas Hardy published his fourteenth novel, Jude the Obscure, as a magazine serial in 1895.

Thomas hardy obscure