The French Lieutenant's Woman
John Fowles, 1969
★ 3.89 from 56.8k ratings on Goodreads
A Victorian gentleman, a mysterious woman on the Cobb, and a novelist who keeps interrupting to ask whether any of us are free. Curiosity and longing drive a lyrical Victorian story, with a philosophical narrator who keeps stepping in to question freedom and desire.
Feels like curiosity, longing and awe. About love, society and freedom.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy love stories tangled with ideas about society and freedom, told in a voice that openly wonders at its own making. Some readers find the narrator's digressions and the cool distance in the romance frustrating.
Why read it
It gives you a love story and a puzzle about storytelling itself, asking how much anyone can choose within Victorian rules and ordinary habit.
A page from the book
The tiny bird that makes a Victorian gentleman’s whole world look vulgar.
A tiny wren perched on top of a bramble not ten feet from him and trilled its violent song. He saw its glittering black eyes, the red and yellow of its song-gaped throat — a midget ball of feathers that yet managed to make itself the Announcing Angel of evolution: I am that I am, thou shalt not pass my being now. He stood as Pisanello’s saint stood, astonished perhaps more at his own astonishment at this world’s existing so close, so within reach of all that suffocating banality of ordinary day. In those few moments of defiant song, any ordinary hour or place — and therefore the vast infinity of all Charles’s previous hours and places — seemed vulgarized, coarsened, made garish. What readers say
Readers often find the novel surprising, intellectually stimulating, and emotionally engaging, especially in its portrait of Sarah and Victorian constraints. Many admire its experimental narration, though some are frustrated by the digressions, multiple endings, and chilly romance.
John Fowles.Fowles lived in Lyme Regis and served as curator of its museum; the town’s Cobb and fossil cliffs underlie the novel’s world.
Books that feel like this
Where to get it
Some of these links earn us a small commission, at no cost to you. It keeps BookFeed free.
Questions readers ask
- Is The French Lieutenant's Woman for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy love stories tangled with ideas about society and freedom, told in a voice that openly wonders at its own making. Some readers find the narrator's digressions and the cool distance in the romance frustrating.
- What is The French Lieutenant's Woman like?
- Curiosity and longing drive a lyrical Victorian story, with a philosophical narrator who keeps stepping in to question freedom and desire. Feels like curiosity, longing and awe. About love, society and freedom.
- What should I read after The French Lieutenant's Woman?
- If you liked The French Lieutenant's Woman, try Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy), Middlemarch (George Eliot) and Great Expectations (Charles Dickens).
A taste of the feed
The strange calm that arrives when a lie comes out perfectly.
Anna said what came to her lips, and marveled, hearing herself, at her own capacity for lying. How simple and natural were her words, and how likely that she was simply sleepy! She felt herself clad in an impenetrable armor of falsehood. She felt that some unseen force had come to her aid and was supporting her.
Anna Karenina · Leo Tolstoy
How hard it is to believe that other people are as real as you are.
We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves: Dorothea had early begun to emerge from that stupidity, but yet it had been easier to her to imagine how she would devote herself to Mr. Casaubon, and become wise and strong in his strength and wisdom, than to conceive with that distinctness which is no longer reflection but feeling—an idea wrought back to the directness of sense, like the solidity of objects—that he had an equivalent centre of self, whence the lights and shadows must always fall with a certain difference.
Middlemarch · George Eliot
Cold enough that the sky stops being any comfort at all.
Joe made the fire and swept the hearth, and then we went to the door to listen for the chaise-cart. It was a dry cold night, and the wind blew keenly, and the frost was white and hard. A man would die tonight of lying out on the marshes, I thought. And then I looked at the stars, and considered how awful it would be for a man to turn his face up to them as he froze to death, and see no help or pity in all the glittering multitude.
Great Expectations · Charles Dickens
Read pages from books like this, one at a time
Keep reading in the feed