Word: victorian
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN, by John Fowles. A fascinating novel that uses the tricks and turns of Victorian fiction to pound home the thesis that freedom is the natural condition...
...hero, Charles Smithson, a young model of Victorian gentility redeemed by intelligence and irony, is an amateur naturalist and a postulant for the new faith of evolution. But he is still pledged to old pieties through his engagement to the shallow daughter of a rich London merchant. Fowles' strategy is to bring the contradictions of Charles' situation-and, by implication, of the Victorian age-to a crisis...
Charles meets Sarah Woodruff, a dark, intense governess who has been ostracized by the town for having a flagrant, fleeting affair with a French naval lieutenant. For Fowles, the unrepentant Sarah embodies the qualities that Victorian society tended to repress-passion and imagination. In the forbidden love that grows between her and Charles. Fowles foreshadows the undermining of an entire epoch. In Sarah's eventual rejection of Charles, to take up a bohemian existence in the house of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Fowles projects the first glimmer of a new and freer...
This thesis makes relevant all of Fowles' seemingly disjointed literary games, documentary digressions and attempts to make the Victorian past appear imminent to our present. In a cunningly oblique way, the whole novel employs an old-fashioned method to draw a timeless moral. As Fowles' epigraph from Marx puts it: "Every emancipation is a restoration of the human world and of human relationships to man himself...
From his 180-year-old house high on a bluff in Lyme Regis, Dorset, John Fowles can look down to a curving stone jetty called the Cobb. Two years ago, he had a vision of a woman in a long Victorian skirt standing there with her back to him. It was the basis for the opening scene of The French Lieutenant's Woman and, says Fowles, "the tiny seed from which the whole book started. It was just an image that came to me in a "hypnagogic state between 'waking and sleeping...