Recommendations
Books Like French Lieutenant's Woman
Postmodern and Victorian Novels Like The French Lieutenant's Woman
John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman is the great postmodern Victorian novel — Charles obsessed with Sarah, the three endings, the author interrupting his own fiction. These 8 novels share its psychological intensity, its self-consciousness about literary convention, and its interest in desire as a force that destroys the social order.
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Rebecca
by Daphne du Maurier
An unnamed narrator haunted by the ghost of her husband's perfect first wife at a Cornish estate — the closest predecessor to The French Lieutenant's Woman in its Gothic atmosphere, its sexually powerful and mysterious female figure, and its obsessive male narrator; where Fowles deconstructs the Victorian novel, du Maurier works within its conventions while bending them toward the psychological thriller
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The Collector
by John Fowles
A butterfly collector kidnaps a beautiful art student and holds her captive — Fowles's first novel is the dark companion to The French Lieutenant's Woman: where Charles is a gentleman whose obsession is restrained by class and convention, Frederick Clegg has no such restraints; both novels are about the destruction of a woman by a man's possessive fantasy, seen from both inside and outside the fantasy
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Jane Eyre
by Charlotte Brontë
A governess falls in love with the brooding Rochester — The French Lieutenant's Woman is in direct dialogue with Jane Eyre: Charles is Rochester, Sarah is a version of Bertha Mason (the woman whose existence prevents the respectable marriage), and Fowles's multiple endings rewrite Brontë's resolution; reading the two together illuminates what Fowles is doing formally
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Possession
by A.S. Byatt
Two contemporary academics discover evidence of a secret love affair between two Victorian poets — Byatt's Booker Prize winner is the other great Victorian-era postmodern novel, sharing The French Lieutenant's Woman's interest in the gap between Victorian life as lived and as represented, its parallel love stories (one Victorian, one contemporary), and its pleasure in literary detection
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The End of the Affair
by Graham Greene
Bendrix's retrospective account of his obsessive love for Sarah Miles, whose true reasons for ending their affair he discovers only after her death — the psychological companion to The French Lieutenant's Woman in its unreliable male narrator consumed by a woman he cannot understand, its wartime English setting, and its moral framework that shapes and distorts love
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Atonement
by Ian McEwan
Thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis makes a false accusation that destroys her sister's love affair, and spends the rest of her life trying to atone — McEwan's most celebrated novel shares The French Lieutenant's Woman's metafictional consciousness about storytelling, its interest in the gap between what happens and how it is narrated, and its devastating final reversal about the relationship between fiction and truth
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The Remains of the Day
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Stevens, the perfect English butler, driving across England and slowly understanding the life he sacrificed — Ishiguro's Booker Prize winner shares The French Lieutenant's Woman's British restraint, its retrospective structure of a narrator who understands too late what he has lost, and its interest in the ways social codes (English class for Stevens, Victorian respectability for Charles) are used to suppress desire
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Middlemarch
by George Eliot
Dorothea Brooke's idealism, Lydgate's ambitions, and the social life of a Midlands town in the 1830s — the Victorian novel that The French Lieutenant's Woman most explicitly rewrites; Fowles admired George Eliot enormously and saw The French Lieutenant's Woman partly as a response to Victorian realism's moral certainties; reading Middlemarch makes clear exactly what Fowles was arguing with
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