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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.


The French Lieutenant’s Woman, appeared in 1969 and won several awards and was made into a well-received film (1981) starring Meryl Streep in the title role and was the most commercially successful.

"Fowles's success in the marketplace derives from his great skill as a storyteller," wrote Ellen Pifer. For whatever reason - he always said it was because he was mistrusted by the British literary establishment he had rejected - Mr. Fowles was always far more celebrated, both critically and popularly, in the United States than he was in his native country. In America, his books became mainstays of college literature courses while managing to achieve that rare combination: admiring reviews from serious-minded critics and best-selling sales in the stores.

Readers at large know John Fowles for two of his most acclaimed novel, The Magus, published in 1965, has generated the most lasting interest, becoming something of a cult novel, particularly in the United States of America.

A recurring theme mentioned above is Fowles’s vision of the world as having a double reality. The Magus puzzles us with its world of dreams and realities on a Greek island, while Sarah Woodruff from The French Lieutenant’s Woman creates her own world, wills herself to be an outsider, a “femme fatale”, apart from convention and history. The Collector presents the struggle of a girl who has built her own reality through memories in order to survive forced seclusion.


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Adapted from NYT Obituary, Nov 7, 2005


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