at the Inns of Court, located off the Strand.

Several years later when he is told that Sarah has been found, Charles returns to London and goes to her address, 16 Cheyne Walk, home of the poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Cheyne Walk is a newly fashionable street on the banks of the River Thames in Chelsea, southwest of the Houses of Parliament. Sarah has been taken up by the most vital and forward-looking artists of that time. At the very end of the novel, Charles, now bereft of all his illusions and old-fashioned assumptions, stands alone on the banks of the Thames, the river of life.

Existentialism

Existentialism is a philosophical and artistic movement that delves into the nature of existence. Its core belief is that existence and experience should be prioritized over essence. The origins of existentialism can be traced back to the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher Sören Kierkegaard and early twentieth-century German philosopher Martin Heidegger.

Following World War II, existentialism reflected on a seemingly absurd world lacking a benevolent creator or protector, where individuals must find meaning through their actions and bear full responsibility for their destinies. This freedom and responsibility can lead to an overwhelming sense of dread. Existentialism has been a predominant theme in the literary works of Franz Kafka, Dostoevsky, Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Samuel Beckett.

The New Woman

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the seemingly stable Victorian universe began to show cracks. In 1859, Charles Darwin's Origin of Species ignited debates on religious ideology and human development. In 1867, Karl Marx released the first volume of Das Kapital, challenging existing notions of class structures and their economic foundations. Robert Huffaker writes, “These eminent Victorians, steadily and without any violent action, helped to shatter the age in which they lived—its faith, morality, confidence.” During this period, feminist thinkers began to rigorously examine female identity in relation to every aspect of a woman's life. Any woman who questioned traditional female roles was labeled a “New Woman,” a term attributed to novelist Sarah Grand, whose 1894 article in the North American Review identified an emerging group of women influenced by J. S. Mill and other advocates of individualism, who supported and campaigned for women’s rights. This led to a dialogue among these women that included both radical and conservative viewpoints.

The most radical thinkers within this group proclaimed that the institution of marriage was a form of slavery and thus called for its abolition. They rejected the idea that motherhood should be the ultimate goal for all women. On the other hand, the more conservative feminists of this era deemed marriage and motherhood acceptable roles only if guidelines were established to ensure that a woman did not become subordinate to her husband in any aspect of their life together. This group believed that a woman who achieved equality in marriage would serve as an exemplary role model for her children by fostering the development of an independent spirit. Chopin’s works contribute to this dialogue, examining a woman’s role in both traditional and nontraditional marital relationships.

Narrative

The novel’s narrative style is distinctly postmodern, emphasizing the self-aware act of storytelling by the author. Fowles abandons the conventional, all-knowing Victorian narrator who divulges every detail about the characters to the readers. Instead, the narrator in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, who identifies as the author, frequently interrupts the story to provide background information, challenging readers' expectations of narrative flow and coherence. He often shifts between different time periods. For instance, he breaks his description of Lyme Regis to mention Jane Austen’s use of the Cobb in her novel Persuasion, written roughly fifty years before the setting of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, and also references a twentieth-century Henry Moore sculpture.

This narrator also avoids giving a clear depiction of Sarah, who remains mysterious throughout the novel. This modern narrative approach suggests that no one can fully know another person, that some enigma always persists, and that our understanding of others is shaped by personal perceptions rather than universal truths.

By constantly intruding into the narrative and identifying himself as the storyteller, the narrator disrupts the reader’s suspension of disbelief by highlighting the fictional nature of the story. This disruption is further intensified by the inclusion of three different endings.

Structure

The first ending offers a traditional Victorian resolution. Charles marries the gentle and conservative Tina, believing she would provide him with stability and secure his social standing. Pursuing Sarah would have risked his social acceptance. However, the narrator rejects this conventional conclusion, presenting it only as a figment of Charles’s imagination.

After dismissing the first ending, the narrator reappears just as Charles begins his quest to find Sarah. He sits beside a dozing Charles on the train, contemplating his character’s destiny and eventually devising two alternative conclusions.

The second ending presents a more modern, yet still romantic, resolution where Charles and Sarah reunite. Refusing to finalize the story there, the narrator reemerges as an impresario, sets his watch back fifteen minutes, and constructs the final ending, in which Charles is left alone. These alternate endings compel the reader to acknowledge the fictional nature of the novel and ultimately engage in its creation.

Fowles playfully employs the techniques of a Victorian novelist in his so-called Victorian novel to advance the narrative and comment from a "god-like" authorial perspective. Simultaneously, he breaks the traditional Victorian form by providing not one definitive (and predictable) ending but three. In the first ending, which improbably occurs in the middle of the book, Charles makes the correct, albeit not entirely joyful, decision to turn his back on Sarah and marry Ernestina. In the typical Victorian novelist's worldview, Charles and Ernestina's lives unfold alongside the lives of Dr. Grogan, the servants Sam and Mary, Mrs. Poulteney, and others. After presenting this Victorian ending, Fowles steps in to inform the reader that it was a myth. He then returns Charles to the crucial moment of choice, and this time Charles opts to spend the night in Exeter to see Sarah. By doing so, Charles chooses life, but he must then learn to navigate risk and chance. After many more pages detailing the next several years of Charles's life, Fowles arrives at another ending, offering a choice of two: one where the couple is happily reunited through their daughter Lalage's intervention, and another where they part ways.

To present both options, Fowles halts the narrative by introducing an authorial persona as a dandy who arrives at the scene in a carriage and checks his watch. He then turns the watch back by fifteen minutes, and the scene plays out again with a different outcome. In this final ending, the existential responsibilities of freedom of choice are revealed. Charles is not reunited with Sarah but instead experiences a rebirth into a higher state of consciousness, enabling him to choose life rather than becoming "fossilized."

By employing this technique of authorial intrusion, which borrows from but breaks Victorian conventions, Fowles not only illustrates his theme of freedom of choice but also practices it himself as a novelist.

John Fowles has long believed that writers of serious fiction are committed to changing the society they inhabit. Although he is not as optimistic as he once was about achieving this through his writing, Fowles still feels he has contributed, even if just slightly, to altering people's perspectives on life. His primary social concerns revolve around the human condition, viewing individuals as trapped in roles that deny them personal freedom and self-awareness. To address this, he places his protagonists in situations they must escape from to achieve freedom. This recurring theme is most evident in The French Lieutenant's Woman, set in a historically repressive period that was beginning to transition into a new era. The protagonist, Charles Smithson, is tasked with breaking free from societal constraints to emerge as a new kind of hero.

Sarah, the titular character in The French Lieutenant's Woman, is similarly confined by a society that labels her as a whore. As the narrative progresses, the reader discovers that Sarah has deliberately adopted this label to live outside society's restrictive norms. This allows her to navigate the world as a free and complete individual. Charles, in following her lead, eventually seeks a similar path for himself. Fowles not only illustrates the journey the seeker must undertake to choose freely but also assigns a crucial teaching role to a woman he clearly admires for her courage in paving the way for Charles. Influenced by existentialist thought, Fowles portrays Charles as an existentialist before Kierkegaard’s time, helping readers understand that Charles is making the "leap of faith" to become his own person.

Freedom of choice and individual freedom are central themes in all of Fowles's novels. What is particularly striking about his treatment of these themes in The French Lieutenant's Woman is his use of a Victorian setting and the format of a Victorian novel, complete with authorial intrusions. He adopts the Victorian form partly to subvert it, intruding not as the omniscient Victorian author, but as a modern counterpart who reflects on the era to make social critiques about its repressiveness and speaks with far less certainty about the fate of his characters.

Late Nineteenth Century: The term “New Woman” emerges to describe women who challenge traditional societal roles, particularly those of wife and mother. Many in society view these challenges as a threat to the family structure.

1970s: Advocates for gender equality are known as feminists, and feminism gains respectability as an intellectual and academic discipline.

Today: The term “feminist” has lost some of its popularity, as feminism now encompasses a broad range of conservative and liberal views. Women have opportunities to work both inside and outside the home. However, balancing career and family can be challenging, partly due to rigid work and promotion schedules.

Late Nineteenth Century: The Married Woman’s Property Act is passed in England in 1882, granting women significant rights. In 1888, the International Council of Women is established to support the women’s suffrage movement.

1970s: In 1972, the Equal Rights Amendment Bill, which aims to ensure gender equality under the Constitution, is passed by the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives but fails to be ratified by the required thirty-eight states, preventing it from becoming law.

Today: Women have made substantial progress in achieving equality. Discrimination against women is now illegal. However, the Equal Rights Amendment remains unratified, despite being introduced in every session of Congress since 1982.

Late Nineteenth Century: In 1871, feminist Victoria Woodhull begins a lecture tour promoting a philosophy of free love, reflecting the women’s movement’s increasing willingness to address sexual issues.

1970s: The term “free love” becomes a cultural buzzword, signifying extramarital, noncommittal relationships, as women use birth control pills to gain sexual freedom.

Today: Women engage in premarital sex and have children out of wedlock without facing the social stigmas of earlier times. The issue of single parenting sparks controversy in the early 1990s when Vice President Dan Quayle criticizes the TV character Murphy Brown for choosing not to marry her baby’s father. Today, single parenting is more widely accepted.

Fowles asserts that the foundational influence for all his fiction, and for fiction in general, is the Celtic romance, which emphasizes the questing hero and the theme of love. This influence is evident in each of his novels, where the modern protagonist must embark on a quest and come to understand and experience love in order to achieve success.

Although the Celtic romance serves as the cornerstone of Fowles's fiction, The French Lieutenant's Woman also draws heavily from the literary traditions of historical fiction, specifically the Victorian novel. Each chapter begins with quotations from authors he admires, including Hardy, Thackeray, and Austen. Poets like Tennyson and Arnold also contribute to the narrative, with a fragment from Arnold's poem "To Marguerite—Continued" encapsulating Charles's journey towards personal freedom and self-awareness.

Another influence, which Fowles only recognized after completing the novel, is the French work he translated, Ourika. This novel tells the story of a young woman from Senegal, brought to France to be raised by Europeans, who becomes an outcast. Unbeknownst to him at the time, Ourika subconsciously inspired Fowles in his portrayal of Sarah, the marginalized figure in Victorian society.

Each of Fowles's novels is stylistically unique. It is often challenging to recognize the same author behind his various works, as they differ greatly in style, structure, and method. While his novels are connected thematically, Fowles is dedicated to experimenting with new ways of crafting fiction, making each book distinct in its approach.

Two of his novels fall under the genre of historical fiction. However, despite The French Lieutenant's Woman and A Maggot (1985) both being set in historical periods, finding further similarities between them is challenging. This diversity in his titles reflects Fowles's pursuit of personal freedom in his writing and his belief that once a novel is published, it no longer holds his interest. He is continually drawn to the excitement of creating his next work of fiction.

The French Lieutenant's Woman was adapted into a movie in 1981, with John Fowles having the authority to veto anything he disapproved of. He convinced Harold Pinter to write the screenplay and Karel Reisz to direct the film. Pinter faced the challenge of creating a screenplay that incorporated modern commentary within the Victorian narrative. Fowles was highly satisfied with the outcome and even wrote the foreword for the screenplay, which was published in 1981.

The film, which received widespread acclaim, featured Meryl Streep as Sarah and Jeremy Irons as Charles. Filming took place in Lyme Regis, the setting of the story and Fowles' residence. The movie is now available on videotape.

Sources

Fowles, John, The Aristos: A Self-Portrait in Ideas, Little Brown, 1964.

—, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Signet, 1970.

Huffaker, Robert, “Chapter 4: The French Lieutenant’s Woman,” in John Fowles, Twayne’s English Authors Series Online, G. K. Hall, 1999; originally published as Twayne’s English Author Series, No. 292, Twayne Publishers, 1980.

Pifer, Ellen, “John Fowles,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 14, British Novelists Since 1960, edited by Jay L. Halio, Gale Research, 1983, pp. 309–36.

Review of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, in Life, May 29, 1970, p. 55.

Review of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, in New York Times, November 10, 1969.

Watt, Ian, Review of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, in the New York Times Book Review, November 9, 1969, pp. 1–2.

Further Reading

Brantlinger, Patrick, Ian Adams, and Sheldon Rothblatt, “The French Lieutenant’s Woman: A Discussion,” in Victorian Studies, Vol. 15, March 1972, pp. 339–56. In their discussion of the novel, the authors conclude that all the endings suggest Charles is “left between Victorian repression and modern freedom, having lost Ernestina but not clearly having gained Sarah.”

Olshen, Barry N., John Fowles, Frederick Ungar, 1978. In his section on the narrative structure of the novel, Olshen rejects the first ending as “traditional, romantic wish fulfillment.”

Palmer, William, The Fiction of John Fowles: Tradition, Art, and the Loneliness of Selfhood, University of Missouri Press, 1974. In an examination of the novel’s endings, Palmer suggests that the introduction of the child is “an antiexistentialist resolution that runs against the grain of Fowles’s intentions as expressed in his own voice within this very novel.”

Rankin, Elizabeth D., “Cryptic Coloration in The French Lieutenant’s Woman,” in Journal of Narrative Technique, Vol. 3, September 1974, pp. 193–207. Rankin argues that the first ending should be seen as an “imperfect stage in the evolution of an existentialist,” and so the second ending should be considered the novel’s true conclusion.