Jude Curtis
Fictional character · In Palace of Tears
Established identity and circumstances
Jude is a young woman living in the Tenison Road house. She is intellectually serious, sexually confident and a writer. She later moves to London, studies at the London College of Printing and produces a letterpress edition of Event/Horizon in an edition of ten copies. She then returns to Cambridge and becomes editorial director of Vanguard Books after its acquisition by Inflexion.
Desires and pressures
Jude wants artistic recognition, professional advancement and a relationship with Steve on terms that do not reduce her to a temporary sexual convenience. She wants him to acknowledge her importance as a reader, publisher and writer.
She is not simply coercive. Her early demand that Steve sleep with her in return for the poem’s return is manipulative, but her later edition of the poem is presented as a gift without an explicit sexual condition. She also refuses to take Steve in after Grace throws him out, insisting that he must earn the right to be with her.
Agency
Jude:
- sleeps with Steve repeatedly;
- rescues Event/Horizon;
- withholds it as leverage;
- preserves and prints it;
- returns a copy to Steve and one to Rob;
- develops a career at Vanguard;
- identifies Steve’s notes in her manuscript;
- asks him to edit her novel;
- tells Ginny that she knows Steve is the biological father of Ginny’s child.
Her decisions repeatedly force Steve to confront the difference between gratitude, obligation, desire and consent.
Position at the end
Jude is professionally connected to Peter and Ginny through Vanguard but still emotionally connected to Steve. Ginny has told her that Steve is the biological father of the baby, giving Jude information that could radically alter the relationships among Steve, Grace, Ginny and Peter.