THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT’S WOMAN

John Fowles
Copyright © 1969 by John Fowles

I do not know. This story I am telling is all imagination. These characters I create never
existed outside my own mind. If I have pretended until now to know my characters’ minds
and innermost thoughts, it is because I am writing in (just as I have assumed some of the
vocabulary and “voice” of) a convention universally accepted at the time of my story: that the
novelist stands next to God. He may not know all, yet he tries to pretend that he does. But I
live in the age of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Roland Barthes; if this is a novel, it cannot be a
novel in the modern sense of the word.
So perhaps I am writing a transposed autobiography; perhaps I now live in one of the houses I
have brought into the fiction; perhaps Charles is myself disguised. Perhaps it is only a game.
Modern women like Sarah exist, and I have never understood them. Or perhaps I am trying to
pass off a concealed book of essays on you. Instead of chapter headings, perhaps I should
have written “On the Horizontality of Existence,” “The Illusions of Progress,” “The History
of the Novel Form,” “The Aetiology of Freedom,” “Some Forgotten Aspects of the Victorian
Age” ... what you will.
Perhaps you suppose that a novelist has only to pull the right strings and his puppets will
behave in a lifelike manner; and produce on request a thorough analysis of their motives and
intentions. Certainly I intended at this stage (Chap. Thirteen—unfolding of Sarah’s true state
of mind) to tell all—or all that matters. But I find myself suddenly like a man in the sharp
spring night, watching from the lawn beneath that dim upper window in Marlborough House;
I know in the context of my book’s reality that Sarah would never have brushed away her
tears and leaned down and delivered a chapter of revelation. She would instantly have turned,
had she seen me there just as the old moon rose, and disappeared into the interior shadows.
But I am a novelist, not a man in a garden—I can follow her where I like? But possibility is
not permissibility. Husbands could often murder their wives—and the reverse—and get away
with it. But they don’t.
You may think novelists always have fixed plans to which they work, so that the future
predicted by Chapter One is always inexorably the actuality of Chapter Thirteen. But
novelists write for countless different reasons: for money, for fame, for reviewers, for parents,
for friends, for loved ones; for vanity, for pride, for curiosity, for amusement: as skilled
furniture makers enjoy making furniture, as drunkards like drinking, as judges like judging, as
Sicilians like emptying a shotgun into an enemy’s back. I could fill a book with reasons, and
they would all be true, though not true of all. Only one same reason is shared by all of us: we
wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is. Or was. This is why we
cannot plan. We know a world is an organism, not a machine. We also know that a genuinely
created world must be independent of its creator; a planned world (a world that fully reveals
its planning) is a dead world. It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us
that they begin to live. When Charles left Sarah on her cliff edge, I ordered him to walk
straight back to Lyme Regis. But he did not; he gratuitously turned and went down to the
Dairy.
Oh, but you say, come on—what I really mean is that the idea crossed my mind as I wrote that
it might be more clever to have him stop and drink milk ... and meet Sarah again. That is
certainly one explanation of what happened; but I can only report—and I am the most reliable
witness—that the idea seemed to me to come clearly from Charles, not myself. It is not only
that he has begun to gain an autonomy; I must respect it, and disrespect all my quasi-divine
plans for him, if I wish him to be real.
In other words, to be free myself, I must give him, and Tina, and Sarah, even the abominable
Mrs. Poulteney, their freedom as well. There is only one good definition of God: the freedom
that allows other freedoms to exist. And I must conform to that definition.
The novelist is still a god, since he creates (and not even the most aleatory avant-garde
modern novel has managed to extirpate its author completely); what has changed is that we
are no longer the gods of the Victorian image, omniscient and decreeing; but in the new
theological image, with freedom our first principle, not authority.
I have disgracefully broken the illusion? No. My characters still exist, and in a reality no less,
or no more, real than the one I have just broken. Fiction is woven into all, as a Greek observed
some two and a half thousand years ago. I find this new reality (or unreality) more valid; and I
would have you share my own sense that I do not fully control these creatures of my mind,
any more than you control—however hard you try, however much of a latterday Mrs.
Poulteney you may be—your children, colleagues, friends, or even yourself.
But this is preposterous? A character is either “real” or “imaginary”? If you think that,
hypocrite lecteur, I can only smile. You do not even think of your own past as quite real; you
dress it up, you gild it or blacken it, censor it, tinker with it ... fictionalize it, in a word, and
put it away on a shelf—your book, your romanced autobiography. We are all in flight from
the real reality. That is a basic definition of Homo sapiens.
So if you think all this unlucky (but it is Chapter Thirteen) digression has nothing to do with
your Time, Progress, Society, Evolution and all those other capitalized ghosts in the night that
are rattling their chains behind the scenes of this book ... I will not argue. But I shall suspect
you.
I report, then, only the outward facts: that Sarah cried in the darkness, but did not kill herself;
that she continued, in spite of the express prohibition, to haunt Ware Commons. In a way,
therefore, she had indeed jumped; and was living in a kind of long fall, since sooner or later
the news must inevitably come to Mrs. Poulteney of the sinner’s compounding of her sin. It is
true Sarah went less often to the woods than she had become accustomed to, a deprivation at
first made easy for her by the wetness of the weather those following two weeks. It is true also
that she took some minimal precautions of a military kind. The cart track eventually ran out
into a small lane, little better than a superior cart track itself, which curved down a broad
combe called Ware Valley until it joined, on the outskirts of Lyme, the main carriage road
to Sidmouth and Exeter. There was a small scatter of respectable houses in Ware Valley, and
it was therefore a seemly place to walk. Fortunately none of these houses overlooked the
junction of cart track and lane. Once there, Sarah had merely to look round to see if she was
alone. One day she set out with the intention of walking into the woods. But as in the lane she
came to the track to the Dairy she saw two people come round a higher bend. She walked
straight on towards them, and once round the bend, watched to make sure that the couple did
not themselves take the Dairy track; then retraced her footsteps and entered her sanctuary
unobserved.
She risked meeting other promenaders on the track itself; and might always have risked the
dairyman and his family’s eyes. But this latter danger she avoided by discovering for herself
that one of the inviting paths into the bracken above the track led round, out of sight of the
Dairy, onto the path through the woods. This path she had invariably taken, until that
afternoon when she recklessly—as we can now realize— emerged in full view of the two
men.
The reason was simple. She had overslept, and she knew she was late for her reading. Mrs.
Poulteney was to dine at Lady Cotton’s that evening; and the usual hour had been put forward
to allow her to prepare for what was always in essence, if not appearance, a thunderous clash
of two brontosauri; with black velvet taking the place of iron cartilage, and quotations from
the Bible the angry raging teeth; but no less dour and relentless a battle.
Also, Charles’s down-staring face had shocked her; she felt the speed of her fall accelerate;
when the cruel ground rushes up, when the fall is from such a height, what use are
precautions?

14