The French Lieutenant's Woman

Description

Of all John Fowles' novels The French Lieutenant's Woman received the most universal acclaim and today holds a very special place in the canon of post-war English literature. From the god-like stance of the nineteenth-century novelist that he both assumes and gently mocks, to the last detail of dress, idiom and manners, his book is an immaculate recreation of Victorian England. Not only is it the epic love story of two people of insight and imagination seeking escape from the cant and tyranny of their age, The French Lieutenant's Woman is also a brilliantly sustained allegory of the decline of the twentieth-century passion for freedom.

John Fowles was born in England in 1926 and educated at Bedford School and Oxford University. John Fowles won international recognition with his first published title, The Collector (1963). He was immediately acclaimed as an outstandingly innovative writer of exceptional imaginative power and this reputation was confirmed with the appearance of his subsequent works. John Fowles died in 2005.

A brilliant success... It is a passionate piece of writing as well as an immaculate example of storytelling * Financial Times * Compulsively readable * Irish Times * A splendid, lucid, profoundly satisfying work of art, a book which I want almost immediately to read again * New Statesman * Brilliant...an artist of great imaginative power * Sunday Times * Marvellous 1969 novel... You can read this book again and again, always finding something new and always falling in love with the hapless Charles. -- Val Hennessy * Daily Mail *