John Fowles's Novels of the 1950s and 1960s

Abstract

In the decades following the Second World War the British novel appeared to be in serious decline, in need of innovation and redirection. John Barth, B. S. Johnson, and Bill Buford remarked, respectively, that the novel form was ‘exhausted’, that the role of the storyteller appeared to have been taken up by the cinema, and that British fiction variously appeared ‘as a monotonously protracted, realistically rendered monologue [. . .] lack[ed] excitement, want[ed] drive, [and] provid[ed] comforts not challenges’.1 The Zeitgeist was also beginning to be infused with what later came to be known as Second Wave Feminism. In Britain small, ad hoc organizations collaborated on a series of conferences in the 1940s that culminated in The Report of a Conference on the Feminine Point of View.2 Alva Myrdal and Viola Klein’s Women’s Two Roles: Home and Work emerged in 1956, followed shortly afterwards by Judith Hubback’s Wives Who Went to College.3 This discourse predates the decade traditionally associated with the emergence of Second Wave Feminism, heralded by Betty Friedan’s groundbreaking The Feminine Mystique in 1963, and echoed in Britain by Hannah Gavron’s The Captive Wife: Conflicts of Housebound Mothers (1966). The movement was accompanied by an increasing number of women fiction writers who articulated the thoughts and concerns of many women on both sides of the Atlantic.4 In the 1950s John Fowles began his creative contribution to this complex postwar discourse, starting a literary conversation that would continue through to 1985 and the publication of his last novel, A Maggot. He produced seven novels and numerous works of poetry and philosophy, which earned him a Nobel Prize nomination in 1999. By the end of the 1960s his artistic trajectory