 Fowles's most successful novel., 2001-06-20
Comment: Lyme Regis, Dorset, 1867. Sarah Woodruff, a young woman dressed in black, stands motionless at the end of a stone jetty and stares out to sea. Walking by are Charles Smithson and Ernestina Freeman, a respectable engaged couple. Ernestina tries to pull Charles away, saying Sarah is a well known local eccentric, nicknamed 'The French Lieutenant's... Woman'. Ernestina is being polite - the self-righteous people of Lyme really call Sarah a whore. Charles finds he cannot erase her image from his memory, and he is fated to meet her again... So begins John Fowles's remarkable 1969 novel, which is an affectionate parody of Victorian 'sensation' fiction, a genre which offered its readers thrills, suspense and danger, always spiced with a love interest. Readers can follow the romantic triangle between Charles, Sarah and Ernestina, or pursue the narrator's digressions into evolutionary theory, social history, and the art of storytelling itself. The novel combines a powerful central narrative with fascinating intellectual games that are never allowed to detract from the unfolding events. The critic Linda Hutcheon has called it a 'historiographic metafiction', meaning it claims to be an authentic historical account of Victorian England and yet, paradoxically, shows how such accounts are made up of words, quotations, metaphors... that is, they are nothing but stories themselves. It is this, as well as the beautiful, enigmatic Sarah and her relationship with the handsome Charles, that creates the novel's fascination. Fowles began the novel as an exercise in imitating nineteenth-century fiction, and thought it would be badly received, because it would seem too coldly intellectual. He was wrong - it is his most successful artistic achievement, and the most popular one along with The Magus. It has been adapted into a film starring Jeremy Irons and Meryl Streep, with a screenplay by the playwright Harold Pinter. This is the first book that anyone interested in Fowles should read. It is one of the most critically and commercially successful experimental novels ever written. It's also great fun. Treat yourself and enjoy it.
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