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While in Lyme Regis to visit his fiancee, Ernestina Freeman, Charles Smithson, a 32-year-old paleontologist, becomes fascinated by the mysterious Sarah Woodruff. A fallen woman said to have been jilted by a French officer, Sarah is a pariah to the well-bred society that Charles and Ernestina are a part of. While searching for fossils in a wooded coastal area, Charles encounters Sarah alone, and his curiosity and pity for her soon evolve into other emotions. It is not clear who seduces whom, but when another opportunity presents itself, Charles embraces Sarah passionately. Shortly thereafter, Sarah disappears, having been dismissed from domestic employment by the tyrannical do-gooder Mrs. Poultenay. Charles finds her in a room in Exeter, where he declares and demonstrates his love. Inspired by his image of Sarah as a valiant rebel against Victorian conventions, Charles rejects the constricting, respectable life Ernestina represents for him. He breaks off their engagement and is harassed with legal action for breach of contract. Meanwhile, Sarah vanishes again, and Charles spends 20 months scouring the world for her, finally tracing her to the lodgings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti in London.… (more)
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And then he doesn't really know how to end it and treats us to some structural hay-making therefrom, which is okay, but also it's like, he really doesn't know how to end it, and the final fudge and paean to freedom are sort of a less clean-lined version of the end of The Magus. But if you had to learn about the Victorian Era and were only allowed to read one book on it ever . . . for its facts and psychology, this wouldn't be the worst option.
I found this all interesting and annoying at the same time. I think it was even more annoying because the characters are so interesting and the plot so familiar (at the beginning at least) that I kind of wanted it to just be a straight ahead Victorian novel. I think it's kind of brilliant that Fowles was able to mesh these two things but it was also kind of jarring to read.
This is one of those books that I'll have to think about for awhile.
At first I wanted to believe Sarah was a wronged woman just trying to survive in the ghastly restrictive Victorian world. I wanted to believe that Charles loved her. Then when he’s presented with logical reasons to the contrary, I wanted him to take Dr. Grogan’s advice and quit her; the scheming wench. He should have let the conventions of the day protect him. In one ‘ending’ he does this and he and Ernestina marry and have a relatively successful (if not quite happy) life together. One breathes a sigh of relief at the bullet dodge. But then there is a lot more novel to get through and we’re immediately told that this might not be really what happens. I found Sam’s betrayal of Charles to be quite cruel despite Charles kind of deserving it.
The scene where Charles leaves Ernestina is the most gut-wrenching of them all. She is palpably in pain and believes that Charles could have made her a better person and in return she would give him the ultimate bridal gift; faith in himself. That nearly made me cry because she totally nailed it. Charles lacks self-esteem in all but the most superficial way. He is a man of his time; liberally educated, an amateur scientist, a doubter of religious dogma, a gentleman of sufficiently independent means and will almost surely inherit an estate from a bachelor uncle. He knows that Ernestina is beneath him socially, but thinks that marriage is something he should do and she will do as well as any; at least she has wealth as a bonus.
His perceived moral and social expectations drive most of his behavior. He wants to be normal, respected and liked. It’s only when he allows himself to become emotional about Sarah, do we see him act outside his catechism. Though even then he views himself as munificent savior as Sarah herself assigns him this role. He feels gallant and romantic envisioning her rescue and elevation to his social rank. In the final ending, she eschews this even after her deliberate turning of the knife in his wound. She maintains that she will never marry and prefers to live with their child as a purported widow, drawing on the kindness of her new benefactor. She denies she ever intended to be cruel and destroy his life, but she is unconvincing. Charles leaves this final vignette as a broken and defeated man. It’s not as satisfying as I thought it would be. I still harbor sympathy for fallible, old Charles and his delusions.
Because this is the longest ending, I think it’s the one Fowles most wanted the reader to accept. Some people were annoyed with this device and the other where Fowles editorializes the story along the way, commenting on differences between his modern era of 1969 and that of the story; 1867. I found it very interesting and diverting. Why should every storyteller tell his story in exactly the same way? The enigmatic quality to the solution adds to its overall worth and if it was done in a more straightforward way would surely leave a less seismic impression.
I had many ‘arguments’ with the narrator whilst I was reading as I didn’t like some of the styles. The reader is presented with a narrator that is telling us a story as he is writing it but when he comes to a certain point where a character might do something he precedes to tell the reader he doesn’t know what will happen as his character hasn’t grown yet, or later on in the novel he’ll say a character has developed and is making their own mind up about something. It was too contrived for me and made it easy to not have to fully develop the plot and characters.
Had I simply been reading a story about the characters of this novel written in the 1960s but set approximately 100 years earlier, it wouldn’t have been anything different so credit to John Fowles for trying to write something more unusual than the norm. I knew nothing of the plot when I read it but I think most people know something of the story and I don’t know if Sarah’s crime was handled in the right way or not. However, I did become caught up in the other character’s thoughts and opinions about Sarah, the French Lieutenant’s Woman as well as her own absorption in her reputation. I think I’ll read something else by him but only because it’s part of a list of books I’m reading through.
Fowles does pull out all the stops in that omniscient point of view--it fits his Victorian setting, and his Victorian theme. The novel seems both homage to the era's novel and a critique of the age. Each chapter is headed with quotes about the Victorian age and by Victorian authors such as Darwin, Marx, Tennyson, Hardy, Arnold. There is plenty of commentary by the narrator about not just the characters and plots, but has the author breaking the fourth wall with statements in first person as author and on the process of writing. It's a technique that is labeled by many post-modern in its self-consciousness, but harkens back to Fielding and Thackeray; it's not just a 20th century thing--read Tom Jones and Vanity Fair some time. And Fowles knew his Victorians and his setting of Lyme Regis in Dorset, England. He wrote two books on Lyme where he spent decades and one on "Thomas Hardy's England." Fowles would interrupt the narrative to tell you one character lived to nearly a hundred and that another would be the ancestor of a noted contemporary actress. There are even footnotes! All in all that playfulness makes up for a lot--I even forgive Fowles his alternate endings. Plus, his style is just so beautiful, so readable. The man is a master storyteller that makes you want to quickly turn the pages to find out what happens and yet linger over the shapely sentences.
With the Magus it was the mysterious Godlike figure and his God Game that had me pulling my hair. What left me feeling almost exhausted trying to figure things out in this novel is its title heroine, Sarah Woodruff. Fowles at one point refers to her as his "protagonist" but it's really Charles Smithson who feels as if he's at the center of the novel. He, at least, I felt I had a handle on. But Sarah? All I can say is she's the most frustrating, inexplicable, maddening heroine I've read since Dominique Francon in The Fountainhead. For the life of me I can't figure her out. Although a friend who read and loved the book told me that's rather the point. I found the women in The Magus rather unreal too, and am not sure if Fowles just is making at root a feminist point about the unreality of the women men construct in their mind, or just doesn't get women. (Although Ernestine Freeman and other minor female characters did feel more real.) At the very least, Sarah does leave a reader with something to chew on.
The story traces the growing passion of the at first conventional Charles for the mysterious Sarah Woodruff, a.k.a. the French Lieutenant's Woman (or Whore). This runs right into his engagement to sweet and shallow (and rich) Ernestina, and eventually into his entire vision of life. Various interesting minor and not-so-minor characters abound, giving the same sense that one has in a "real" Victorian novel -- of a fully populated world, full of people who are interesting for their own sakes, as well as active in the plot. I was reminded of Eliot, Dickens, and so forth (and, more frivolously, of Caryl Brahms' 1940 pastische, "Don't, Mr. Disraeli").
I can't recommend this book too highly. I look forward to rereading it -- not something I commit to very often, these days -- and to taking the time to savor the many delights it offers. In the meantime, I will watch the movie.
I would have read it for the Victorian commentary if nothing else, though. I loved that.
Review: A rich, enchanting work that functions on multiple levels. On one level there is the basic story of Charles and Sarah, their unavoidable passion for each other, and the complications that brings to Charles’ engagement to the traditionally feminine Ernestina. On the other level The French Lieutenant’s Woman is also a reflection on Victorianism and the values of that age, especially Victorianism as it contrasts against modernism. Fowles is particularly concerned with that fine edge, that sense of fin de siecle.
Fowles also writes a lot about the nature of writing itself, and the capacities of fiction. The metafictional aspect of the novel comes from his narrator’s constant interjections about the characters’ motives and decisions. It’s a self-reflexive novel in that it draws attention to the art of writing a novel, as well as the characters’ own life beyond that of the writer’s intentions.
With all that said, The French Lieutenant’s Woman seems like it would run the risk of being dry and boring, pseudo-intellectual with no entertainment. That’s far from true. Fowles writes in a lively manner that kept me interested even when he talked about things that didn’t interest me.
Conclusion: I can see why it’s so popular. One of those novels that’s hard to define because it doesn’t seem like it should be good, but it is.
The author's wry asides on his fictional yet historically accurate setting stood out more than the story. He passes comment on reading ('Thus it had come about that she read far more fiction, and far more poetry, those two sanctuaries of the lonely, than most of her kind. They served as a substitute for experience') and the art of writing (the soul-destroying chapter thirteen), on civic destruction, the middle class (which 'sincerely and habitually despises itself') and the Victorians - oh, the Victorians! 'What are we faced with in the nineteenth century? An age where ... there was an enormous progress and liberation in every other field of human activity; and nothing but tyranny in the most personal and fundamental'. Sarah, the eponymous character, either encapsulates that double standard, or manages to break free. She is either a 'doubly dishonoured' woman who commits social suicide, or a crafty young woman of 'superior intelligence and some education' who has a 'professional line in the way of looking melancholy'. I'm still not sure if Sarah is brave or bonkers, but she's still better than Charles!
Compared to that other famous novel set in Lyme Regis, I enjoyed The French Lieutenant's Woman, which I had previously only known via the film with Meryl 'The Actress' Streep and Jeremy Irons, but the ending was disappointing and the smug narrator rather overplays his hand after a while.
This book on the face of it, reads like a Victorian Gothic love story yet it was written in the 1960's and is a kind of ironic homage to that genre. Fowles uses many of the traditions and conventions of a Victorian
The subject of this novel is essentially the isolation resulting from an individual's struggle for self-hood and despite the title the central figure is not Sarah Woodruff ( The French Lieutenant's Woman or Tragedy as she is more commonly known) but Charles Smithson, a 32 year old bachelor of independent means from an aristocratic family who is engaged to marry Ernestina, the daughter of a wealthy self-made man who is in 'trade' and who would bring a large dowry to any marriage.
Charles' attitudes toward Sarah and Ernestina are very different and are revealed in the way he talks to them. He feels stiff and uncomfortable with Sarah because she won't accept the way in which he categorizes the world, including his view of her because he does not know who he really. He is a Gentleman but also appears rudderless looking for a direction in a changing world. In contrast Sarah is fully aware of herself as an individual who refuses to be defined by conventional roles. However, However Charles changes with Ernestina, with whom he is indulgent and paternal whilst with his servant Sam, he is patronizing. Here he feels comfortable in his role in society. Sarah's honesty, confuses and beguiles him in equal measure. Therefore Charles must travel from ignorance to understanding whereas Sarah and Ernestina alter very little. The knowledge he arrives at is bitter,
Fowles in particular, is concerned with Victorian attitudes towards women and economics. He highlights the problems of two socially and economically oppressed groups in nineteenth-century England: the poverty of the working and servant classes, and the economic and social entrapment of women. While the plot traces what seems to be a love story, the reader questions what sort of love existed in a society where many marriages were based as much on economics as on love. I won't give the ending away other than to say that this is not a traditional love story. The novel is actually a psychological study of an individual rather than a romance.
Now whilst I ended up enjoying this more than I initially expected to enjoying Fowles writing style I fear that I found it lacking for unlike Victorian authors like Dickens or Wilkie Collins this novel was delivered whole as opposed to monthly. Therefore it at times lacked that real spark that almost compelled you to read a little more. This was particularly true when he switched to the first person voice. That said and done I can see why this is regarded as a Modern classic and while it appears on the '1001 Before I Die' list.
The mysterious woman, Sarah, will keep you guessing throughout, right to the very end. You’ll think she’s pitiful, then you’ll wonder if she’s crazy, then you think she may be mean, and round and round.
THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT’S WOMAN by John Fowles, written in 1969, is a Victorian-sounding novel. Fowles mimics the style of, maybe, Jane Austen or maybe Charles Dickens. At the same time, he interjects his own voice and compares the Victorian age with modern (1969) times.
This book is, although long, not long enough. When you read it, get very comfortable; you won’t want to put it down. And you’ll hate to see it end.
Still, I can't say I loved this book, but that's because "The French Lieutenant's Woman," like so many stories of star-crossed Victorian love, is more or less suffused with a sense of impending doom from the very first page. You know these characters will make poor decisions, and, since Fowles makes sure you know the brutal constraints of the society in which they live, you know they'll pay dearly for them. Reading through the end of the novel, then, is not unlike watching trapped insects wiggle helplessly under the beam of a gigantic magnifying glass until they expire. I got the same sensation reading "Jude the Obscure," and, truth be told, I didn't enjoy it much then, either. Even so, I'll recommend this one to any reader out there.