Question 1

What is The French Lieutenant's Woman about?

Accepted Answer

The French Lieutenant's Woman follows Charles Smithson, a wealthy young paleontologist engaged to the conventional Ernestina Freeman, who becomes obsessively fascinated with Sarah Woodruff — a governess ruined, as local gossip has it, by her affair with a French naval officer. The novel is set in Lyme Regis in 1867 and is partly a Victorian love story, but it is also a metafictional commentary on the Victorian novel itself: Fowles interrupts the narrative repeatedly to discuss his characters as characters, the conventions of the Victorian novel as conventions, and the nature of fiction as fiction. The novel famously ends with three possible endings — one conventional, two not — and the reader must choose, or accept the uncertainty. It is at once a romantic novel, a philosophical meditation on free will and determinism, and a formal experiment in what the novel can do.

Question 2

Why does The French Lieutenant's Woman have multiple endings?

Accepted Answer

The novel's three endings are a formal enactment of its themes. Fowles argues throughout the novel that the Victorian novel's convention of resolving all its plot threads — giving characters exactly what they deserve or what the moral framework demands — is a kind of lie about the nature of experience. Real lives do not resolve; real choices between possible futures are not undone by knowing which one was taken. By offering multiple endings, Fowles refuses to collapse the novel's possibilities into a single determined outcome. The first ending (Chapter 44) is the conventional Victorian one — Charles and Ernestina marry, Sarah disappears, life continues. The second ending (Chapter 60) and third (Chapter 61) both follow from Charles's rejection of Ernestina, but reach opposite conclusions about his reunion with Sarah. Fowles inserts himself into the narrative as a character to make the final choice between them — and then makes it in a way that may itself be ironic.

Question 3

Is The French Lieutenant's Woman a feminist novel?

Accepted Answer

Sarah Woodruff is one of the most complex female characters in British fiction — a woman who has, in a sense, invented herself, who uses her reputation as a fallen woman as a form of freedom, who refuses the roles Victorian society prescribes for her. Fowles clearly admires her as a figure of radical autonomy. But The French Lieutenant's Woman is not feminist in a straightforward sense: it is written by a man, its primary perspective is male (Charles's obsession with Sarah is the engine of the plot), and Fowles's treatment of Sarah has been criticized by feminist scholars who note that she remains largely mysterious even at the novel's end — a screen onto which the male narrator projects his desires rather than a fully realized subject. Fowles was himself aware of this tension, and the novel's metafictional interruptions occasionally acknowledge the author's compromised relationship to his female protagonist. It is a novel about freedom written by a man who cannot fully escape the conventions it critiques.

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