Summary | Author | Reviews | Discussion Questions
The French Lieutenant's Woman
John Fowles, 1969
467 pp.
In Brief
In a feat of seductive storytelling, John Fowles immerses us in the emotionally charged world of a Victorian love triangle and, through a startling act of literary invention, reveals the image of modern man reflected in the past. The French Lieutenant's Woman is perhaps the most beloved of Fowles's internationally best selling novels; it is universally regarded as a modern classic. (From the publisher.)
The French Lieutenant's Woman, on one level a historical romance, is on another level an audacious, innovative experiment in storytelling. The novel portrays Victorian characters living in 1867, but the narrator / author, writing in 1967, intervenes with wry, ironic commentary. The plot centers on Charles Smithson who is engaged to Ernestina Freeman, a conventional, wealthy woman. But after a series of clandestine trysts with a beautiful, mysterious woman, he breaks off the engagement. The woman, Sarah Woodruff, a social outcast, is the reputed lover of a French lieutenant who has deserted her—and Charles first sees her waiting on the pier for his return. The intrusive narrator / author, who offers readers different endings, encourages us to reach our own conclusions.
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About the Author
• Birth—March 31, 1926
• Where—Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, UK
• Death—November 5, 2005
• Where—Lyme Regis, Dorset, UK
• Education—University of Edinburg; B.A. Oxford University
• Awards—Silver Pen Award
John Fowles's works of fiction include The Collector, The Magus, The French Lieutenant's Woman, Daniel Martin, Mantissa, and A Maggot. He is also the author of The Aristos: A Self-Portrait of Ideas, Poems, Shipwreck, Islands, and The Enigma of Stonehenge. He lives in Lyme Regis, Dorset, England.
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Critics Say. . .
...Fowles manipulates all the story-teller's artifices to challenge our usual assumptions about the authority of the novelist....At first the narrative voices seems to be that of the traditional Victorian author....It is appropriately enough in Chapter 13 that the new rules of the game break through the surface. [Until then Fowles has followed] "a convention universally accepted...that the novelist stands next to God; but after all he actually lives in the world of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Roland Barte [French theorists]." The dogma of the responsible omniscient narrator is dead [which allows the author a] new freedom....
Our final impression is of pleasure and even, on occasion, awe, at so harmonious a mingling of the old and the new in matter and manner.
Ian Watts - New York Times, 11/09/69
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!
Joyce Carol Oates - Washington Post Book World
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
Readers Say...
(Occasionally, when few critical reviews are available, we include helpful reviews by Barnes & Noble customers.)
Amazing and Beautiful! John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman was the first book I've read in a long time that did not seem trite and false. Humanity exudes from every character explored and the greater ideas of love, freedom, and identity make this book a must-read. I have always been slightly enamoured of 19th-century Britain and this novel explores many of the contradictions of that era. A beautiful love story for the Romantic and an amazing thought-provoker for the Thinker.
Reviewer - a graduate English student, 02/15/02
One of the great books of all times! This book delivers just about everything a book can: complex ideas, a compelling and surprising plot, beautiful language, subtle eroticism and passion, and historical context. Absolutely fantastic!
Reviewer - a fan of great books, 09/26/01
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Book Club Discussion Questions
Sorry, the publisher hasn't made any available for this book.
But don't despair. Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• Generic Discussion Questions
• Read-Think-Talk About a Book
Also consider our LitLover discussion points:
1. Charles Smithson (Fowles is playing here with James Smithson, the founder of the Smithsonian museum) is hunting fossils and meditating on Darwin's challenge to the old scientific order when he stumbles upon a new species—Sarah Woodruff. How does the idea of a new vs. old order pervade this book in terms of its characters and in terms of Fowles's reworking of fiction?
2. What is your attitude toward the book's different endings? What is Fowles trying to do? Which ending do you prefer? Which one do you think is most realistic? Would you have preferred a single ending?
3. Are you willing to give up on a narrator's or writer's authority to control events of a story? Are you comfortable or uncomfortable with that idea? You might also consider Ian McEwan's Atonement—how that story also offers competing versions of "reality."
2. Freedom from societal conventions is an overriding theme in this novel. How do the each of the characters respond to the social constraints of Victorian society? How does Fowles, as an author, confront the constraints of traditional storytelling?
5. Discuss the characteristics of Charles, Tina, and Sarah. Is Charles worthy of Sarah?
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