The French Lieutenant's Woman

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