French Lieutenant's Woman

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I was curious to re-engage with French Lieutenant’s Woman, having read the book at the age of eighteen and not since (closer to 1969, when it was first published, than today). I remembered the novel in different ways to how I experienced it afresh – perhaps the central romance struck me more deeply then, or perhaps I appreciated the little writer-tricks more now.

Fowles draws us immediately into the coastal setting of England’s Lyme Bay, where a provincial society is as close minded as the forbidden nature is liberating. In the second chapter, the betrothed Charles and Tina spy the mysterious figure dressed in black – the French Lieutenant’s Woman – so-called because of a known liaison at a time when women of a certain class kept their names intact at all costs. This allegedly fallen-woman is defiant, doubling before Charles with her, “unforgettable face, and a tragic face” (p. 10). From that moment, Charles is smitten (though it will take him some time to admit to the fact).

Fowles' novel has been described as postmodern, and one immediately notices that the narrator both draws us into the Victorian view, and comments on it – so that we move between the world of fiction he consciously evokes, and a more conventional literary world we inhabit. In Chapter 13 Fowles (or his narrator) breaks free: ‘This story I am telling is all imagination. These characters I create never existed outside my own mind … I live in the age of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Roland Barthes; if this is a novel, it cannot be a novel in the modern sense of the world’ (p. 95). This chapter is an authorial meditation and largely we move back into the story thereafter – until, famously, we come to an initial end (‘And so ends the story’ [p. 340] where Sarah and Charles separate and Charles returns to his senses, and an extended, alternative end – where Charles follows his heart, suffers for it, and meets Sarah again in the future. It would be best not to say more, but a story which branches is consistent with a story knowingly invented, as if Fowles is merely a writer on a train, staring back at his creation.

Towards the end, our narrator comments, ‘This river of life, of mysterious laws and mysterious choice, flows past a deserted embankment; and along that other deserted embankment Charles now begins to pace’ (p. 470). 

I, for one, pace with him.

Fowles leaves me thinking about how different the Victorian mind is to our own, and yet also how all of us tell ourselves stories to justify either adhering to convention (most of the time) or breaking free (amorally, bravely, foolishly?). While solid Charles' uncertainty traverses the ages, Sarah remains an enigma, for although her right to choose her fate may appear at odds with the narrator’s god-like powers, she is something of an artist herself. ‘The story you are telling is not only your imagination, but mine’ – she might have said. Don’t leave me staring out at sea.

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