Classics Revisited: 'The French Lieutenant's Woman'

The French Lieutenant’s Woman, John Fowles’ 1969 postmodern novel, achieved the impossible – a literary work lauded by academics and a popular bestseller. The novel used all the tricks and techniques of a Victorian classic, the author’s voice ever-present, with footnotes, epigraphs, and digressions into whatever he considered significant. He breaks off the narrative to remind us that, for instance, even now, Karl Marx is busy at work on Das Kapital in the British Museum Reading Room or that Darwin’s writings are creating a furor. As an avant-garde writer in the late 1960s, Fowles was amused by the Victorian prudery and repression of a century ago. The author himself appears as a character on a train. Oh, and the novel has three discrete endings. The reader gets to choose!

This parallel structure also illuminates the many ways we were and are still living in the shadow of the hypocrisies, sexual politics, Darwinian dogmas and brittle self-confidence of the Victorian era. This felt topical in the early 80s, shortly after Mrs Thatcher came to power – and not long before she expressed her commitment to “Victorian values”. Today, at a time of food banks, “Dickensian” levels of poverty and inequality, and people unable to heat their homes, its renewed relevance is horribly compelling. Matthew Reisz, 2022 on his father’s work.

Clearly, the novel, with spectacular settings that include Lyme Regis and its famous Cobb seawall (where Louisa Musgrove fell off the steps in Jane Austen’s Persuasion), had potential as a film. Director Karel Reisz and writer Harold Pinter interpret Fowles’ modern Victorian novel with its ever-present narrator as a movie within a movie.