What Book to Read?

While I’m on my current kick about romance fiction, I thought I’d write about book that isn’t a traditional romance, but plays with the romance formula. In it, boy meets girl, their romance meets obstacles, but these are overcome. Or are they? John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman was published in 1969. Fowles didn’t set out to write a typical romance. Rather, he was consciously using the nineteenth century romantic convention in a modern way.

The French Lieutenant’s Woman is set in Lyme Regis in 1867, a hundred years before Fowles, who also lived in Lyme, started writing the book. Charles Smithson, a young man with expectations of inheriting his uncle’s title and estate is engaged to pretty Ernestina, daughter of a wealthy merchant. He needs no profession, and dabbles happily enough in the sciences, particularly palaeontology; he is stirred by the ideas of Darwin about evolution. But he is vaguely dissatisfied with his life. Walking one day with Ernestina on the quay, they come across a mysterious woman dressed in black, Sarah Woodruff, and Charles is immediately disturbed by her face. He learns that she is supposedly awaiting the return of a French sailor she nursed back to health, and had an affair with, making her a complete social outcast. He meets her again apparently by accident. And he gradually finds himself becoming obsessed with her, ‘like an intolerable thirst that has to be assuaged’. She represents to him what he will give up if he goes ahead with his unadventurous marriage to Ernestina.

So we have a romance, but with a twist – who is the romance going to be between? Will it be Charles and Ernestina, who have to overcome the obstacle of Charles’s attraction to the ‘other woman’ in order to settle down in rational happiness? Or will it be Charles and Sarah, who have to overcome the obstacle of Charles’s conventional view of the world?

I’m not going to say which it is. But rather like Mr Rochester, Charles has to lose almost everything before he can find his beloved again. And Fowles has written the story with two alternative endings. Readers can choose which they prefer – and consider how far the conventional romance structure places constraints on the free will of characters set within it.

Fowles departs from conventional romance fiction in other ways. The story begins as if it is being told by a first person ‘I’ who is reporting the past from the present, as in ‘This remarkable event took place in the spring of 1866, exactly a year before the time of which I write’. The author offers observations and comparisons with the present day, and comments about modern consequences of actions at that time. This is the god-like view many nineteenth century writers took to their stories. Then, without warning, the writer breaks off and addresses the reader. ‘Who is Sarah? Out of what shadows does she come? I do not know. The story I am telling is all imagination. These characters that I create never existed outside my own mind’.  And he goes on to question what is real and what imaginary. ‘We are all in flight’, he says, ‘from the real reality’. But you can read the story without paying too much attention to these postmodern musings.

This novel of course stands on its own without reference to its place in romance fiction. Indeed it made it onto Time’s All Time 100 Novels list (actually since 1923). But I still find it interesting to consider how Fowles has used the romance formula to such clever effect.

The Time All Time list can be found here.

More about John Fowles can be found here.