Jude the Obscure

Jude Fawley is born into the working class but dreams of becoming a scholar. He teaches himself Greek and Latin while working in a bakery. Will his dreams of a better life come true? There was this change in him; that he did not often go to any service at the churches now. One thing troubled him more than any other; that Sue and himself had mentally travelled in opposite directions since the tragedy: events which had enlarged his own views of life, laws, customs, and dogmas, had not operated in the same manner on Sue's. She was no longer the same as in the independent days, when her intellect played like lambent lightning over conventions and formalities which he at that time respected, though he did not now. - Excerpt from Jude the Obscure.