The French Lieutenant's Woman Book

I happen to come across two versions of this novel at the same time, this one, and one featuring Meryl Streep on the front cover. I was always going to pick this one, as when I think of Meryl Streep The Deer Hunter immediately comes to mind, and the last thing I wanted when picking up this book each day and seeing her face was to think of Linda, the Vietnam War, and Christopher Walken's sad demise playing Russian roulette. This is afterall a book about Victorian sexual repression on the south coast of England.


A woman stands at the end of a deserted quay and stares out to sea - this was a strong image that came to John Fowles one morning back in 1966, he at first thought he saw the image as the representation of a myth, like many ancient stories of women left at home while their sea-faring lovers travel off far and wide to war, or to fulfill some divine destiny. Eventually, the woman in Fowles's vision had a name, Sarah Woodruff, thus The French Lieutenant's Woman started to take shape. All this coming long after the haunting landscape and coastal areas of South Dorset were plaguing his thoughts. This novel was inevitable. And even though it does build some vivid images of the coastal landscape, the lasting impression I have is of two lovers stuck in separate emotional cul-de-sacs.

In the case of Miss Woodruff, abandoned by a French lieutenant, who as it happens, despite his name being in the title, plays almost no role in the novel's most important events. Fowles is more interested in the burdening enigma of this fallen woman, the ostracized female viewed
by her community as a source of sexual scandal and gossip. Such women were well-known to Victorian society, and might even appear in a tale or two, but rarely anything more than a cardboard figure, a part in a moralizing tale about female weakness or the dangers of concupiscence. Fowles wisely understood that such characters could be better created, and tell us things about nineteenth century life that the female protagonists of a Jane Austen or a William Thackeray would never truly reveal. Fowles's utter fascination with Sarah Woodruff is shared equally by his leading male Mr. Charles Smithson. By the standards of Victorian England, Smithson is highly educated, worldly and enlightened. He dabbles in science, and admires Charles Darwin.
And yet Smithson is still repressed, and completely out of touch with his own drives and unconscious desires, his notion of sexuality is still embedded in the moral and religious views of his time and place. He wants to be the Gentleman with a respectable Victorian wife (that would be Ernestina) but Miss Woodruff, the Community's 'whore' as she is known, can't escape the other self he fears that he will turn out to be.

Sarah, who is clearly overrun with melancholia, refuses to play the role of a disgraced harlot, or even the victim. She is drawn as a powerful woman, with an enclosed sexual appetite and inner life perhaps deeper than Smithson. Fowles relies on the strong female to create the dramatic conflicts in this novel, and Sarah Woodruff is in the end one of the most memorable ladies I have encountered in fiction. I was worried this would turn into just another dull romantic story, with characters you couldn't give a hoot for. Thankfully it isn't. It's also clever in the way the narrative is binary in nature, as the novel extends to provide two endings. There is the conventional romance and it's deconstruction. Considering it was first published in 1969 Fowles does a remarkable job of bringing Victorian England to life.

Everything is effectual in terms of his story, apart from one niggle, for some strange reason Fowles decides to cut into the story every now and then to remind us we are reading a work of fiction. I think the term Metafiction probably applies. Not sure why he thought best to do this. But anyhow, I still dish out a strong four stars.