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Fowles's fiction was never merely dry, intellectual sparring. He was a writer possessed of an expansive imagination, whose gifts as a storyteller meant that his dramas were played out beyond the conflicts of the inner self. His narrative genius led to three of his novels being filmed, two of them to critical acclaim.

John Fowles, the British writer whose teasing, multilayered fiction explored the tensions between free will and the constraints of society, even as it played with traditional novelistic conventions and challenged readers to find their own interpretations of his work.

In 'The French Lieutenant's Woman," for instance, he combined the story and melodrama of a 19th-century Victorian novel with the sensibility of a 20th- century postmodern narrator, offering his readers two alternative endings from which to choose, and at one point boldly inserting himself into the book as a character who accompanies its hero on a train to London.

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Adapted from NYT Obituary, Nov 7, 2005

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