(Or better to say, since she's not real: wondering if Hardy intentionally set her character up to convey that.) She does finally overcome her aversion, to the extent of having children with Jude, but it's a fragile adjustment. The love of his life, Sue, is particularly confused: she combines an open, somewhat flirtatious manner with a pathological aversion to sex that left me wondering if she'd been abused as a child.
The women in his life are used and confused in turn, not so much by Jude as by the terrible straitjacket women were forced into. Let down by everyone he chooses as a mentor (one of them doesn't last long enough for a round trip from one village to the next) spurned by the university he longs to enter and used and confused by the women in his life, he keeps trying to draw a smaller circle in the sand after each fresh assault, but ultimately he loses, and by then he doesn't care, and then he dies. Jude, a decent man with ambitions to become a scholar, doesn't stand a chance in Hardy's cold universe.
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