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Quite a detailed history of the book here, Auntlie - looks like your gran had a bootleg copy. It also looks like the US was first to allow legal publication of the book (albeit more than 30 years after it was written): http://web.ukonline.co.uk/rananim/lawrence/lcl.html
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Carpal Tunnel
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Lady Chatterly and Jude the Obscure were published at about the same time. I don't know that Jude was banned, but there was quite an outcry against it as being an immoral book--and Hardy, consequently, stopped writing novels and turned strictly to poetry.
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old hand
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I don't know that Jude was banned, but there was quite an outcry against it as being an immoral book--and Hardy, consequently, stopped writing novels and turned strictly to poetry.WW, that story makes a salient point. Any truth to it? by challenged books, i think they mean books that are fighting legal challenges-- that have been banned by some school or locality.Uh, lets see, that would mean that all 100 books are currently being contested in our court system, with some haven been in contention for ten years or more. Gee, you would think that by now some bannings would be have been found illegal and some bannings would have been ruled proper and let stand. But if not, our snail-paced legal system is an embarrassment to we all, and we should not mention it in front of our good friends who live overseas. ___  PS: Maybe we could ask the Chinese and the Iraqis and 70% of the other nations of the world how they manage their Banned Book Lists. ___ 
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Yeah, milum, there's a lot of truth in what I wrote. I don't have the exact dates, but 1896 is pretty darn close to when it all happened for Hardy--for him to announce that he would write no more novels. And he didn't.
Here's something off the Web:
"In 1896, following more than 20 years as one of the most popular and most
criticized novelists in England, Thomas Hardy announced that he would not write
another novel as long as he lived. He kept his word. He refused to give in to critics
who had attacked his works as being overly pessimistic and peopled with immoral
characters.
Looking back at Hardy’s novels today, it is hard to imagine that they sparked such
violent responses from Victorian critics. Yet the attacks on Hardy’s last two major
novels, Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, were particularly fierce.
Many libraries banned Jude from their shelves, and one bishop announced that
the book was so indecent that he had thrown it into a fire. Hardy responded that
the bishop had probably burned the book because he couldn’t burn its author.
From his appearance and personality, Thomas Hardy would seem an unlikely man
to provoke such controversy. He was small, quiet, and shy. He was a country
person rather than a city person, and the characters of his novels have a realistic,
earthy quality about them."
I do believe that Lady Chatterly and Jude were published the same year. Edit: I stand corrected by AnnaS. below--I was completely wrong about Chatterly's date of publication here.
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re: Gee, you would think that by now some bannings would be have been found illegal and some bannings would have been ruled proper and let stand.
most of book banning are local issues.. and fought in local court, and since the US supreme court said that obsenity is based on community values, and values do change in different locations, there is no one hard and fast rule about what is obsene, and futher, many of the banned books are banned from local libraries, and schools, they are not banned in toto.
But if not, our snail-paced legal system is an embarrassment to we all, and we should not mention it in front of our good friends who live overseas.
PS: Maybe we could ask the Chinese and the Iraqis and 70% of the other nations of the world how they manage their Banned Book Lists.
while i think is important to educate and share values, fact is not all countries value free speach. (and by extentions, freedom in published material) but it is my right, hard fought and won. and it upsets me, when my first ammendment rights are trampled.
if i should leave the US and move even to as liberal and open a country as the UK, i would not have the same rights to free speach that i do here. What is done in China or Iran is not to be desired or emulated, but to be mourned.
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I do believe that Lady Chatterly and Jude were published the same year.Tut-tut, Dub-dub. LCL (as I mentioned above) was published in the late 1920s -- 1928, I just discovered, after LingIU. Your Jude predates that by more than three decades. Not that this takes away from anyone's point, but one does like to keep the facts straight. 
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Thanks for the correction, AnnaS.
Honest-to-goodness, when I read Jude this summer, I could have sworn that in the jacket cover notes of the edition I read that there was a big comparison between Jude and Lady Chatterly--and that I'd read that they'd been published the same year--and that that had surprised me. But on I went in my ignorance, just surprised by the info.
I have no idea how I misread what I read, but I did.
Thanks again,
WW
P.S. But I am certain Hardy never wrote a novel after Jude because of the harsh criticism it received for both its sexuality (which seems very surprising because what sexuality that is there is very much controled) and its story of a couple who were married to other people but who lived with each other.
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Well I see The Giver by Lois Lowry made the list. I'm not sure why, and yet I am not surprised, since it was an interesting and intelligent book about a kid who challenges and ultimately changes a whole societal system.
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It's generally thought that the US has the most liberal societal attitudes to matters over which some would seek to ban books, for the obvious reason that the US has constitutional guarantees such as the 1st amendment. But societal suppression can in practice be just as effective in terms of practical censorship. The UK has in practice a greater tolerance of eccentricity, unorthodoxy, not fitting in, etc. Seizing and destroying books, or other legally derived measures are not the only method of inhibiting free speech.
Interesting too that literary expression is so cherished in the US but the electronic media (ie TV, where the vast majority of society gets its entertainment - how many people read books?) are in practice heavily censored. UK or indeed Oz TV (and likely Zild TV too) are liberal and robust by comparison.
jj
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