French Lieutenant's Woman

This book was well written, but to my way of thinking a bit too verbose. It wasn't exactly what I expected, & as a writer myself I found the author's sentences a bit too long at times - but an interesting tale, well worth reading. However, I felt it could have been a bit more concise without losing the story content.

In John Fowles’ engrossing novel, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, a Victorian gentleman, Charles Smithson, is by turns entranced, befuddled, and devastated by a mysterious woman who is, according to local gossip, the spurned ex-mistress of a French naval officer.There you have the “elevator pitch”, the bare-bones synopsis of what becomes a nautilus-shell of complexity, a maze under which the ground is always shifting. The one fixed point of reference, and a welcome one for readers, is Smithson himself. Educated and affluent,he is a curious dilettante, a gifted amateur naturalist, and a man who deserves a more interesting wife than the shallow Ernestina, to whom he is engaged.The unconventional stirs within Charles. He is insightful enough to recognize the hypocrisy and repression of his era, and through his dabbles in marine biology, his embrace of Darwinism, and above all his relationship with the woman, Sarah Woodruff, he breaks through to the surface of clear thinking in many ways and on many occasions.She, on the other hand, resembles nothing so much as a thoroughly 20th century woman, a woman of the late sixties for that matter — the years in which Fowles wrote this novel— with no Victorian psychobaggage and a complete unconcern for what others think. She is no brave heroine, however, no barrier-busting avatar of a glorious future. At the very least, she is a liar. She exhibits more sado-masochistic tendencies than a shelf full of case studies. She desires, and she repels. She is as reliable as a cat. As a study in psychology, she could occupy a professorial team for years. Only Charles Smithson — because he is Victorian — believes in her essential decency, and he invents rationalizations to fit.What follows, after several years and assorted convolutions, is that the author gives up. Fowles goes interactive on us. This is what might have happened, he reports ..or perhaps it was this other, opposing, solution. Addressing readers directly, he invites us to choose our own ending — but then goes on to conclude the story himself, spiraling off into a situation that makes the book seem less than the sum of its parts. I find this a serious flaw, perhaps the only one in the construction and execution of this fine novel.Fowles combines a gift for driving narrative with a lyrical, limpid prose style. His descriptions are evocative to the point of technicolor. He views the Victorian milieu with the authority of a scholar and the sympathy of a friend. He consistently breaks the fourth wall, addressing his readers in 20th century language and employing contemporary references, and is often very funny in the process: of a Mrs. Poulteney, a monstrous character, he remarks, “There would have been a place in the Gestapo for the lady.”This sort of whiz-bang virtuosity is effervescent fun, for the most part; where Forbes’ wit begins to falter, however, is in his assumption that his modernity, his values or better said anti-values of the sixties, are the last words, to be forever etched in stone. We see this in his many references to Freud, a godhead figure at that time but rendered irrelevant if not unknown since; in his belief that “Man knows everything now,” and that therefore the future will be devoted solely to the pursuit of pleasure; and in condescending statements about “peasants”, among many others. I laughed out loud when he suggested that Victorians were unfortunately benighted in that, unlike “us”, they did not have “the lessons of existentialist philosophy... at their disposal.” Existentialism and Freud: as faded, and dated, as a Fillmore East poster. The times don’t stop a-changing..If you enjoy a complex read, and if you have an interest in things Victorian, you will probably enjoy The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Believe me, this book is better than it sounds, and compelling in the extreme. Just be warned about the ending.

Its all about the book. Unbelievably good.

I’m not really even sure how to describe this book. I put it down with no intentions of picking it back up, but I finished it for the characters, barely.The author decided he needed to address his characters progression from his perspective. So many times are you in the middle of a poignant setting and Fowels decides he has to chime in and back up his decision to write them this way? It came off so self-centered, and happened so many times, I put the book down.I eventually finished it for the characters, and *spoiler alert*, just how Smithson blows up his engagement for Sara, Sara blows up Smithson in a multiple 3-option ending where no one really ends up happy.

Great read.

I know that I read this one many years ago but couldn't remember very much about it. I appreciated it more with this second reading many years later. An unusual delivery with the story set in Victorian times with a modern day twist. Charles Smithson, a man torn between his marriage, duty to Ernestina and his lust for the more earthy and forbidden Sarah Woodruff, the French Lieutenants Woman. Poor Charles torn between his wallet, position and his heart. When reading this novel I felt more empathy towards Charles than with Sarah, she seemed more removed from the reader, more enigmatic in her motives, thoughts and deeds.For this reader however it was Mrs Poultenay, on the fast track to reach the pearly gates who stole the show. I don't feel that this is a book for everybody but it was different, certainly not what I remembered. 4.5 stars

What a delicious book! Fowles' faux-Victorian novel works as a story, works as an exploration of Victorian life and literature, and works as a meditation on the nature of fiction. It's a compulsive read -- the author may remind us quite frequently that this is just a story, but the story still kept me turning the pages, and I didn't mind a bit when he went all post-modern at the end. It's also a very enjoyable read, with sparkling minor characters, enlightening looks at Victorian mores and fiction, and witty apercus scattered like confetti.The story traces the growing passion of the at first conventional Charles for the mysterious Sarah Woodruff, a.k.a. the French Lieutenant's Woman (or Whore). This runs right into his engagement to sweet and shallow (and rich) Ernestina, and eventually into his entire vision of life. Various interesting minor and not-so-minor characters abound, giving the same sense that one has in a "real" Victorian novel -- of a fully populated world, full of people who are interesting for their own sakes, as well as active in the plot. I was reminded of Eliot, Dickens, and so forth (and, more frivolously, of Caryl Brahms' 1940 pastische, "Don't, Mr. Disraeli").I can't recommend this book too highly. I look forward to rereading it -- not something I commit to very often, these days -- and to taking the time to savor the many delights it offers. In the meantime, I will watch the movie.

Mark Twain said "“A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read" and unfortunately that sums up what I feel about The French Lieutenant's Woman. It's very long, over 400 pages and very little happens - Victorian man about to be married lusts after, and has short fling with, a woman with an uncertain past. And, no matter how it is meant to show the narrowness and hypocrisy of society and the restraints placed on women, that's it. Surely it shouldn't take 400 plus pages. There is no plot, most of the characters are unlikeable and the ending is one of the most unsatisfactory I have ever read. Also, have I mentioned this takes over 400 pages!

First published in the 1960s, this is one of the first overtly metafictional novels that both criticize and pay tribute to the Victorian period. If you liked A.S. Byatt's ‘Possession’, or Barnes's ‘Arthur and George’, you are likely to have read this book. But if you haven't, I think you should: you'll probably love it.Fowles's omniscient narrator is so salient that he becomes one more character in the novel, literally; he even intrudes in the narrative at one point. It's not only that he has access to and comments freely on everything, but he does so in a time-conscious way, juxtaposing their society and world-view to ours. This line of analysis is one of the themes of the novel, but it's made attractive by adding healthy doses of irony and humour to the mix.In my view, Fowles combined self-reflexivity with entertainment to produce a 20th-century classic.

I don't usually comment on endings, but here the author himself doesn't seem to have attached narrative importance to it (and I don't give it away in any case)...It does all go so well until the ending, previously having toyed intelligently with the reader Fowles declares he cannot make up his mind and uses literary pretensions as a cop-out - turning the motives implausible to air his own political points. It came over more as moral cowardice to me, given his preferred ending is obvious, but spoils the story (and I'm not referring to happy or sad endings).If you don't mind politics and sociology lectures (bearing in mind the incarnation of both have a limited shelf-life and this was published 1969) hijacking your novel reading then it may feel a refreshing change for you. If you do mind being invited to a sumptuous dinner to be bored by the host afterwards then you may be put out.Either way I'd urge you to read this book. It contains the best modern depiction of the Victorian age from an author who truly understood it.

"I do not know. This story I am telling is all imagination... I have disgracefully broken the illusion?""No."Many would argue the real main character of this novel; the oblivious young gentleman searcing desperatly for his own identity, or the young woman- the French Lieutenant's Whore, in fact - that he falls in love with.Both are incorrect. The most prominent character in this tale is Fowles himself. Writing from 1969, Fowles explores the Victorian era through every character he brings to our attention, with emotion that only comes from passionately studying the period. What manner of emotion? It ranges at times from commiseration to downright disdain.Fowles understand the conventions of typical Victorian romantic novels and brutally exploits them. The is no fallen woman who find redemption in the love of a man. No lovers attempting to overcome their separate classes. This novel understands Dickens and resents every image he made of Victorian England. The novel doesn't hold back, often finding itself delighting in some of lives harsher truths.The person you obsess and find yourself heart-sick over is often far from the idolised image you paint of them.Some men are haunted by the fact that there are women in the world far more attractive that the one they're with.And, despite every effort to pretend otherwise, women are capable of cruelty and manipulation that rivals, and even sometimes surpasses, men.In "The French Lieutenant's Woman", Fowles creates a world impossible not to find yourself lost in lost, without using any of fiction's cheap tricks. In fact, you may find that he'll use them against you, building up your expectations only so he can crush them with a wit that few novelists possess. A lot of criticism aimed at the novel seems to be based on confusion as to what it actually is. Is it a story of two lovers trying to see if they can discover themselves in one-another? An in-depth essay on Victorian values? Or perhaps a lecture on how novelist creates novel?In my opinion, it's all three of these. And if my conclusion on that matter has made you interested in picking this novel up, I utterly implore you give this novel the chance it has very rightfully earned. .

Not only is this a Victorian novel written as it really was and not written in the decent language as many 19th century writers did, Fowles also brings a study of the Victorian age in this book. Though I am not a fan of the writer's interruptions in the story and the double ending, it didn't make the story less exiting to read