Jude's hopes of gaining admission to Christminster are dashed by the class system not many self-taught manual laborers were accepted into British universities at the time, and there is a poignant scene where Jude, rejected as a scholar, defiantly recites the Creed in Latin in a pub, to an audience of drunken proles who mock his learning. He studies for his entrance exams, and takes her to meet Phillotson ( Liam Cunningham), who offers her a teaching job. Jude goes to Christminster, where he falls in love at first sight with his cousin, Sue ( Kate Winslet, from “Sense and Sensibility”) and follows her to a socialist meeting. She thinks she is pregnant, they marry, and their marriage is symbolized in a scene where Arabella dresses a pig carcass while he studies Greek and Latin.Īrabella, played by Griffiths as a sturdy, lusty woman with plans of her own, abandons Jude when she comes to believe that she is not pregnant and leaves for Australia. They make love in a barn, their passion accompanied by the noises of the animals. “If you want to do anything in your life, Jude,” he tells him, “that's where you have to go.” But the boy has few opportunities and no money, and soon he is courting Arabella ( Rachel Griffiths), a pig farmer's daughter. The movie stars Christopher Eccleston as Jude Fawley, a stonemason from a small village whose tutor, Phillotson, takes him to the top of a hill and shows him the towers of Christminster (which is meant to be Oxford).

Jude the thomas hardy novel