‘Phase the Last: Farewell to Fiction’

Abstract

‘An act of literary suicide’ was the verdict of one of the reviews on the pig-killing chapter of Jude the Obscure (Lerner 1968: 113). The novel itself developed from an idea for a short story about a young man ‘who could not to go to Oxford’ whose struggles ended in suicide (Life 216). Jude, I want to suggest, was a deliberate farewell to the whole business of writing fiction. The Postscript’ to the Wessex Edition of the novel refers to the violent attacks from which it suffered as ‘completely curing me of further interest in novel-writing’ (JO 466). The Life too places the decision to abandon fiction after the critical ‘misrepresentations’ from which Jude suffered (Life 309). Having finally established himself as ‘the leading English novelist of the day’, however, with Jude itself joining the first collected edition of his work, the decision, as Millgate argues, probably preceded its composition. The Preface casts ‘a retrospective and suspiciously valedictory glance … over his past career’ while ‘the very forcefulness of the social criticism suggests that he knew the novel was to be his last and deliberately incorporated views and feelings which had been largely suppressed’ in his earlier work (Millgate 1971: 340–1). He would still revise his 1892 serial ‘The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved’ for its publication in book form but he would embark upon no more full-length fiction.KeywordsPast CareerRailway CarriageSerial VersionRealist FictionPublic TasteThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.