The French Lieutenant's Woman

by John Fowles

Overview

Perhaps the most beloved of John Fowles's internationally bestselling works, The French Lieutenant's Woman is a feat of seductive storytelling that effectively invents anew the Victorian novel. "Filled with enchanting mysteries and magically erotic possibilities" (New York Times), the novel inspired the hugely successful 1981 film starring Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons and is today universally regarded as a modern classic.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316230131
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	04/08/2025
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	394
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

John Fowles (1926-2005) was educated at Oxford and subsequently lectured in English at universities in Greece and the UK. The success of his first novel, The Collector, published in 1963, allowed him to devote all his time to writing. His books include the internationally acclaimed and bestselling novels The Magus, The French Lieutenant's Woman, and Daniel Martin. Fowles spent the last decades of his life on the southern coast of England in the small harbor town of Lyme Regis.

Read an Excerpt

They stopped. He stared at the black figure, "But I'm intrigued. Who is this French lieutenant?"

"A man she is said to have . . ."

"Fallen in love b&nwith?"

"Worse than that."

"And he abandoned her? There is a child?"

"No. I think no child. It is all gossip."

"But what is she doing there?"

"They say she waits for him to return."
—from The French Lieutenant's Woman

Editorial Reviews

By giving characters their freedom, Fowles also liberates himself from the tyranny of the rigid plan; but there remains a more basic limitation of fiction, and from this Fowles frees himself by means of his double ending: "The novelist is still a god," Fowles says in The French Lieutenant's Woman, "since he creates (and not even the most aleatory avant-garde modern novel has managed to extirpate its author completely); what has changed is that we are no longer the gods of the Victorian image, omniscient and decreeing; but in the new theological image, with freedom our first principle, not authority." Thus, although the novel seems in many ways a Victorian novel, the author reminds the reader that it is not; it is actually a novel of our time, with "this self-consciousness about the processes of art [that] is a hallmark of much twentieth-century fiction.

Gale Research

A miracle of sorts….an absorbingly dramatic love story…and a virtuoso stylistic performance.
—New Republic

Edward T. Chase

Dazzling…audacious…highly rewarding….A remarkable, original work in which at least two visions operate simultaneously, the one Victorian and melodramatic, the other modern and wise. An outlandish achievement!
—Washington Post Book World

Joyce Carol Oates

A wonder of contemporary fiction….It meets the simplest, oldest, and least fashionable test of excellence. You never want it to end.
—Life

Webster Schott