Sue Bridehead: A New Woman

Abstract

Sue Bridehead is in many ways at the centre of Jude the Obscure. It has been argued that she ‘takes the book away from the title character, because she is stronger, more complex, and more significant’. Her very inconsistency and elusiveness, the sense of profound depths lying beneath her ‘brilliant and puzzling surface’, create a fascinating ‘air of the inexplicable and even the mysterious’ (Heilman, 1966: 307). She is very much ‘The New Woman’, which is one of the titles Hardy himself proposed for a dramatisation of the novel (Millgate, 1971: 312). In her reading of Mill, Shelley and Swinburne, in her questioning of the institution of marriage, and above all in her search for a new model of womanhood, she fits the mould of the ‘modern intelligent mentally emancipated young woman of cities’ whom Hardy, writing of one of Florence Henniker’s heroines, reckoned to be ‘by far the most interesting type of femininity the world provides for man’s eyes at the present day’ (Blake, 1982: 147).