John Fowles: a life in two worlds

Abstract

Although John Fowles's novels - among them The Magus and The French Lieutenant's Woman - have enjoyed huge critical and popular success around the world, little is known of Fowles himself. In Eileen Warburton he has at last found the capable biographer he has long deserved. Eileen Warburton provides a richly detailed portrait that emphasizes his emergence as one of the twentieth century's most important writers. She chronicles his prewar childhood in the Essex town of Leigh-on-Sea and in wartime rural England, his Oxford education, and his apprentice years in Europe and London. From a lifetime of intimate correspondence, she narrates Fowles's thirty-seven-year love affair with his wife Elizabeth, the woman who inspired his most memorable female characters. And she follows the astonishing trajectory of Fowles's long writing career - from his spectacular debut novel, The Collector, to the haunting The French Lieutenant's Woman, through his later fiction, poems, essays and translations. Based on exclusive access to the journal that Fowles has kept for fifty years, to personal letters, interviews and unpublished works, this searching biography will give readers a long-overdue look at this extraordinary writer.