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The French Lieutenant's Woman

by John FOWLES

JOHN FOWLES
(31 March 1926 5 November 2005) was an English novelist and essayist. In 2008,The Times newspaper named Fowles among their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945.

Fowles was born in Leigh-on-Sea in Essex, England, the son of Gladys May Richards and Robert John Fowles.His family was of middleclass merchants of London. Robert's mother died when he was 6 years old. At age 26, after receiving legal training, Robert enlisted in the Honourable Artillery Company and spent three years in the trenches of Flanders during World War I;

LITERARY CAREER
In late 1960, though he had already drafted The Magus, Fowles began working on The Collector. The Collector was also optioned and became a film in 1965. In 1965 Fowles left London, moving to a farm, Underhill, in Dorset, where the isolated farm house became the model for The Dairy in the book Fowles was then writing, The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969). His works The Ebony Tower (1974), Daniel Martin(1977), Mantissa(1981), and A Maggot (1985) were all written from Belmont House.

The French Lieutenant's Woman


Perhaps the most beloved of 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", the novel inspired the hugely successful 1981 film starring Meryl Strep and Jeremy Irons and is today universally regarded as a modern classic.

The novel's protagonist is Sarah Woodruff, the Woman of the title, also known unkindly as Tragedy and by the unfortunate nickname The French Lieutenants Whore. She lives in the coastal town of Lyme Regis, as a disgraced woman, supposedly abandoned by a French naval officer named Varguennes married, unknown to her, to another woman with whom she had supposedly had an affair and who had returned to France.

SUMMARY

CONTINUATION...

She spends her limited time off at the Cobb [sea wall], staring at the sea. One day, she is seen there by the gentleman Charles Smithson and his fiance. Ernestina tells Charles something of Sarahs story, and he develops a strong curiosity about her. Eventually, he and she begin to meet clandestinely, during which times Sarah tells Charles her history, and asks for his support, mostly emotional.

On the pretext of helping Sarah, Charles arranges a number of meetings with her. He realizes he is attracted to Sarah, but decides to give her money and send her away to Exeter; he visits her alone and after they have made love he realises that she had been, contrary to the rumours, a virgin. After breaking off his engagement to Ernestina, Charles finds Sarah in London, where she is working as a model for the pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti. From there, the novelist offers three different endings for The French Lieutenants Woman.

The endings of the novel: First ending: Charles marries Ernestina, and their marriage is unhappy; Sarahs fate is unknown. Second ending: Charles and Sarah become intimate; he ends his engagement to Ernestina, with unpleasant consequences. Third ending: the narrator re-appears, standing outside the house where the second ending occurred; events are the same as in the secondending version but, when Charles finds Sarah again, in London, their reunion is sour. . It is possible that their union was childless; Sarah does not tell Charles about a child, and expresses no interest in continuing the relationship.

THEME
THEME:
In this novel, Fowles is interested in the literary genre of the nineteenthcentury romantic or gothic novel and succeeds in reproducing typical Victorian characters, situations and dialogue. But Fowles perception of the genre is touched with typical twentiethcentury irony. His thematic concerns range from the relationship between life and art and the artist and his creation to the isolation that results from an individual struggling for selfhood.

Fowles aim is to bring to light those aspects of Victorian society that would appear most foreign to contemporary readers. Victorian attitudes towards women, economics, science and philosophy are tackled as minor themes within the main plot. Both women and the working-class are two groups that are revealed as being oppressed both economically and socially in a society that inhibits mobility for anyone who is not middle or upperclass and male. These are the social issues that Fowles explores within the guise of a traditional romance.

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