626. The French Lieutenant's Woman

The French Lieutenant's Woman
John Fowles
1969
Around 470 pages

It seems strange that John Fowles would create a novel about a serial killer keeping a woman a basement, and then come out with a Thomas Hardy style romance. But structurally, this is similar to The Magus, so I guess it is not totally out of left field. 

Sarah Woodruff is a "disgraced woman," which in the nineteenth century means you had a relationship that didn't work out. She works as a servant for the pious Mrs. Poulteney, and spends her free time staring out at the sea, like all single women do. One day, Charles Smithson and his fiancee Ernestina Freeman, see Sarah walking along the cliffside. Charles falls for Sarah, and Fowles presents three different ways the story could end.

This is a brilliant parody of the novels that I personally love, penned by Hardy, Thackeray, Eliot, and Dickens. He really captures the way women are treated in these novels, even his title demonstrates how women were always defined by the men in their lives. This is when I don't mind postmodernism as much. I actually enjoyed his footnotes and relationship between the narrator and the unruly characters. 

I also appreciated the alternate endings, demonstrating that there is really no reality where every character lives happily after, as is often implied in Victorian novels. And of course, it gave Meryl Streep an excuse to do an accent, which is always fun.

RATING: *****

Interesting Facts:

Time chose the book as one of the 100 best English-language novels since the magazine began publication in 1923.

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