The French Lieutenant's Woman »

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, published in 1963, allowed him to devote all his time to writing. He spent the last decades of his life on the southern coast of England in the small harbor town of Lyme Regis.

Well-known as an international bestseller and Award-winning film, The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles is magnificent entertainment. This virtuoso reading by actor Jeremy Irons is storytelling at its best. Fowles' intricate portrait of Victorian relationships and love, brought to life by Irons' artistry, will haunt you long after the story ends.

Gale Research

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.