“The Contradictions of a Victorian Romance in John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman”,

Appropriations (A Refereed Journal published by Department of English, Bankura Christian

College), Volume 8, December 2012, ISSN 0975 1521

THE CONTRADICTIONS OF A VICTORIAN ROMANCE IN JOHN FOWLES’S

THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT’S WOMAN

DR SNEHA KAR CHAUDHURI

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
WEST BENGAL STATE UNIVERSITY

John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) is a romantic novel set in the
Victorian period that explores the standard social ambivalences and tensions determining
Victorian gender discourses. The romantic plot consists of the love triangle between Charles
Smithson, Sarah Woodruff and Ernestina Freeman. The narrator both strives to maintain the
effect of realistic narration in this romantic narrative and contradicts any definite closure to
the love story by suggesting three different logical but mutually conflicting endings. My
intention in this chapter is to discuss this novel as a Victorian romance renegotiating the
boundaries of gender normativity and subversion. Simultaneously, I also want to point out
that Fowles’s claims to feministic catholicity are equally indeterminate and open to
inconsistencies and contradictions. The Victorian protofeministic male authors like Thomas
Hardy and the female New Woman novelists, who have provided the inspiration behind this
novel were equally ambivalent about Victorian sexual politics. 1 Fowles purposively retains
their ambiguity in his representation of Victorian patriarchy and its gender ideology.
All Fowles’s critics generally argue that The French Lieutenant’s Woman is a
significant and thoughtprovoking contribution on the Victorian gender ideology. But they are
eternally divided about which position Fowles endorses in relation to the Victorian Woman
Question.2 By providing more than one ending to his novel, he seems to occupy multiple
ideological positions about the treatment of Victorian gender issues. He can be genuinely
admiring, supportive, emphatic as well as subtly patronizing, highly duplicitous and
patriarchal in articulating his stand on the Victorian gender debates. While his responses to
manhood have been very critical, his attitude to womanhood has been deliberately ironical
and mutually conflicting (See Bruce Woodcock 1984: 81). His critical reappraisal of Victorian
gender discourses resembles the selfcontradictory narrative forms of the nouveau roman and
historiographic metafiction.3
In his critical essays and occasional interviews, Fowles has repeatedly defined
himself as a ‘feminist’ male writer. He has made no explicit reference to any specific
contemporary feminist school of thought and has always managed to avoid answering how his
variety of feminism relates to any particular brand of academic feminism. In an interview
with Dianne Vipond, he claims to be a feminist, though in the ‘most ordinary terms’ and
discredits masculinity as ‘the old peasoup fog’, that can never aspire to the conditions of true
humanism (1999 : 452). He also wants to be a ‘chameleon gender-wise’ and asserts:

I am a novelist because I am partly a woman, a little lost in midair between

the genders, neither one nor t’other. I certainly think that most novelists are a
result of not being clearly typed sexually… [h]e [Angus Wilson] was very
much such a typical masculinefeminine writer (Vipond 1999: 435).

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Responding to critic Pamela Cooper’s objections that all his female characters are passive
objects of male desire or inspirational Muse figures but not independently creative
themselves, he confesses that he finds women erotic and enigmatic (Vipond 1999 : 435) .
The coincidence of the period of the rise of radical feminism in the early 1970s and
the composition and publication of this novel around 1969 should not be overlooked. Fowles
has written this novel in an intellectual climate ripe for a revolutionary upsurge of feminism.
This period is historically akin to the 1860s in Victorian society, when the Woman Question
became almost a prototypical feminist movement. Moreover, 1867, the year in which this
novel begins, is also the time of the publication of John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of
Women, a formidable male defence of Victorian female emancipation. 4 In the light of these
similarities, one can conclude that in the 1960s, Fowles, a male writer, moves a hundred years
back to re-examine sympathetically and critically the tensions, doubts and ambivalences
attending the rise of Victorian feminism, the prototype of contemporary radical feminism.
This further proves that when the historical past is interrogated, it is not done in oblivion of
contemporary concerns. Thus, the past and the present come closer in their ability to reflect
on each other.
Fowles uses class as the prime dynamic in Charles’s relations with both Sarah and
Ernestina. Sarah neither gets vocational opportunities nor respect due to her humble
background. In a society rife with class and economic divisions, her personal merits go
virtually unrecognized because she is forced to become a governess, a kind of surplus
woman. Any ambition on her part to rise higher is immoral, indicating her dissatisfaction with
her position in society. Her desire for a happy married life with a gentleman is transgressive
in a class hierarchy categorizing talented but economically bankrupt women as ‘surplus’
maidens (Poovey 1989:127). Ernestina’s match with Charles spawns from her father, Mr
Freeman’s desire to improve his own social status by marrying his daughter with an
aristocrat. Through the token of his daughter, Mr Freeman wants an entry into a relation with
aristocracy, a connection worth cultivating for its prestige. He also remotely aims to convert
his aristocratic soninlaw to the ways of the bourgeoisie, so that the CharlesErnestina pair
combines both social honour and wealth. With his book-keeping mind, Mr Freeman
calculates the best and most profitable interclass marriage for his daughter. In Chapter
Eleven, Fowles satirizes the confounded reaction of Charles, Ernestina’s sentimentality and
Mr Freeman’s mercenary attitude in the following words:

No words were needed. Ernestina ran into her mother’s opened arms, and
twice as many tears as before began to fall. Meanwhile the two men stood
smiling at each other; the one as if he had just concluded an excellent
business deal, the other as if he was not quite sure which planet he had just
landed on, but sincerely hoped the natives were friendly (Fowles, The
French Lieutenant’s Woman 1992 :75).

This coveted union on the basis of class and economic standard ignores the importance of
mutual understanding and passion required to sustain marriage. Charles’s subsequent loss of
ancestral property and his disregard for a career in commerce nullify Mr Freeman’s
calculations (See Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman 1992: 173-4,244-58). The love
between Charles and Ernestina is also not deep and passionate because of the reservations
and secret prejudices they harbour against each other. Their relationship is confusing,
mechanical and predictable because it lacks the characteristic enigma of the CharlesSarah
romance. In Chapter Two, Fowles shows how Charles is enamoured by one passionate glance
from the strange woman by the sea, Sarah Woodruff and he also makes us notice how Charles
feels vaguely bored of Ernestina’s frivolity and small talk (See Fowles, The French
Lieutenant’s Woman 1992: 10-14). The CharlesErnestina affair is typically mundane and
suffers from want of passion and good mutual understanding. Ernestina remarks that Charles
is too scientific, unromantic and lacks conventional male gallantry. In this respect, she is
correct because Charles is never really interested in amorous flirtations with nubile coquettes,

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a commonplace pastime in fashionable élite circles. In Chapter Eleven, while narrating the
genesis of the CharlesErnestina love story, Fowles proves Charles’s lack of interest in
conventional romantic courtships and also shows how Ernestina attracts him with her clever
and unpredictable behaviour, although, Fowles quickly downsizes her cleverness by pointing
out that her manners and her marriage proposal to Charles were similar to those ‘women who
in the London of the time haunted the doorways round the Haymarket’ (Fowles, The French
Lieutenant’s Woman 1992 : 74). Fowles, here, is emphasizing Charles’s inability to recognize
Ernestina’s mediocrity. Although Ernestina completely fails to bring out the romantic side of
Charles, Sarah’s advances make the true romantic side of his nature to flourish. Sarah
reminds Charles of the emptiness in his life and makes him see through Ernestina’s pettiness
and fall out of love with her. Ernestina is also implicitly uncomfortable, shouldering the
duties and responsibilities of a married woman, but suppresses her doubts to act the martyr
figure since ‘the cross had to be borne’ (Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman 1992: 71).
She never conveys her doubts to Charles and irritates him with her petty queries on the décor
of their new house and other such everyday trifles (Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman
1992:102). Their relationship is weak because it is based on moral constraint, social duty and
compromise rather than true passion and emotional commitment.
On the other hand, Sarah is victimized in a classdivided provincial society for her
poverty. She overcomes this discrimination in a more egalitarian city life, where she earns by
herself. She is, thus, less fettered to her parental class than Ernestina. Being a farmer girl,
Sarah is attached to Nature, but has nothing else in common with the other women of the
peasant class. But Ernestina is the typical daughter of a nouveau riche bourgeois family and
has nothing exceptional to stand out in the herd of frivolous, nubile girls of her social
standing. Class hierarchy and conflict, finally, affect the destiny of the love triangle due to
Charles’s servant, Sam Weller’s cunning intervention, which determines his master’s
romantic life to a large extent.
Apart from economic factors, individual attitude of the characters towards romantic
love also determines this love triangle. A major underlying condition of romantic love is
complete selfabnegation, willingness to sacrifice and compromise for one’s beloved. This
selfdenial is demanded more on the part of women presumed to be more emotional and
vulnerable than men in love. Men as rational creatures are expected to be more prudent,
sceptical and restrained. But Sarah’s passionate pursuit and subsequent casual abandonment
of Charles undermine this reason/ emotion binarism deployed to essentialize gender
distinctions. Sarah has the feeling of a woman, but the intellect of a man and her activities
negate traditional Victorian assumptions about women. The quest of her life is not love and
emotional stability but the essential Existential qualities embodied by the ‘female principle’
(See Loveday 1985: 48-81). As a literary character, Sarah is Fowles’s special creation; a
crossbreed between the gritty and unconventional Victorian New Woman and the pretty and
vulnerable passive female victims of Victorian literature. The latter role as the narrative
progresses largely proves to be a selfimposed illusion, an artistic pretence. Linda Hutcheon
aptly clears the confusion as to whether Sarah is the passive Muse figure or the active female
artist and finds her a ‘surrogate’ of the novel’s protean narrator. 5 Therefore, the key to
understanding the role of men and women in love in this romantic narrative lies mainly in
Sarah’s character.
Sarah displays the impersonality, mental strength and in a negative sense, the
treacherous selfishness that most Victorian men were permitted to express without remorse,
guilt and responsibility in a maledominated society. She performs the seductive roles of the
likes of Victorian fictional heroes, George Eliot’s Squire Donnithorne and Thomas Hardy’s
Sergeant Troy and Alec D’Urberville, who exploited women for their lust but easily avoided
the blame for it. Fowles turns this Victorian male hypocrisy on its head by making the hero,
Charles; suffer the same degradation and emotional bankruptcy that Victorian heroines
generally encountered. It is also no coincidence that the hero of Fowles’s Victorian novel is
an aristocrat and his heroine is an apparently powerless and underprivileged village woman.
It is an instance of Fowles’s redemption of Victorian female victimization through Sarah’s

3
fictional revenge. Here it must be pointed out that the contemporary writer’s perception of
Victorian society is largely predicated upon its representation in Victorian literature,
particularly the novel, which for him/her largely means the realistic reflection of the Victorian
world in all its complexity. This attribution of factualism to Victorian fictional discourses
blurs the boundaries between legal, social, economic and cultural tracts and fictional
literature. NeoVictorian writers access the Victorian past through these textual
commentaries in both fictional and nonfictional discourses.
Is Sarah’s revenge against Victorian patriarchy anachronistic? Is her recalcitrant
individuality historically feasible? Does she really achieve the kind of freedom thinking
women aspire to? Does her modus operandi of emancipation really prefigure the agenda and
dynamics of 1970s feminism occurring about a hundred years later? These are the leading
questions that seem to haunt any critic analyzing Fowles’s treatment of Sarah’s emancipation.
A partial clue to these provoking queries can be found in Sarah’s unconventional nature and
the set of circumstances in which she is presented. Before analyzing her character and her
social life, I want to propose that, whatever Fowles’s pretensions, Sarah and all the other
characters cannot be free from his iron grip, even when he pretends to release them to pursue
their own freedom (See Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman 1992: 85-88). One has to
keep in mind that the three endings offered in the novel do not imply the character’s freedom
to act, but they exist as three historically plausible and socially realistic endings of the love
triangle. In formulating these three endings, Fowles simultaneously endorses three mutually
opposed ideological positions, which are perfectly in tune with the deliberate
selfcontradictions the writer / narrator displays. The real freedom of choice is offered to the
reader, whether he would prefer a conventionally happy Victorian ending (Chapter
FortyFour) or an unconventional but happy Victorian ending (Chapter Sixty) or a tragic
modernized ending (Chapter SixtyOne). That is, perhaps, why Harold Pinter seems to have
done a typical commentary in his screenplay version of the novel by making the Victorian
couples unite, while their modern enactors part hopelessly (See Pinter 1991 :1-104). Pinter
seems to have essentialized Victorian men and women as timid, desperately seeking support,
emotional security and choosing middle-class conformity over the troubled hesitation, moral
ambiguity and uncertainty openly accepted by the modern lovers, Anna and Mike. However,
Fowles’s rendering of the Victorian psyche is much more complex and empowering. He
seems to suggest that some Victorian women, especially educated and freethinking like
Sarah, were able to glimpse the attractions of Existential freedom and courted its fatal
consequences (See Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman 1992:305-309).
Sarah achieves freedom for herself, not for Charles, who by virtue of being her lover
gets a taste of that special kind of freedom. Ironically, this Existential freedom fetters and
confounds him more than it releases him. The notion of freedom in this novel has many
worthy commentators.6 R.P. Lynch’s essay, for example, is particularly interesting for its
ability to suggest how Sarah achieves true freedom and authenticity which eludes Charles.
(2002: 51) He argues that Charles’s bondage to Sarah’s memories are deep and emotionally
frustrating, while in comparison, reliance on the opposite sex for Sarah ultimately becomes
professional, economic and wholly external (See Lynch 2002 : 63-66). Contrarily, one must
also point out that Sarah achieves inner freedom, but she is constrained by economic factors
to depend on men (she works as Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s amanuensis and model). Moreover,
in the third and ultimate ending, Fowles does not give us any final indication or assurance
that Sarah would continue as a single woman without growing any romantic commitment in
the near future. A.S. Byatt’s Victorian heroine, Christabel LaMotte in Possession: A Romance
(1990) achieves relatively greater autonomy after her affair with Randolph Ash for being both
financially more secure and creatively more abundant than Fowles’s Sarah Woodruff.
LaMotte transcends the attractions of male love and achieves true independence by virtue of
her creative life and adequate ancestral wealth. Ironically, it is also true that her seclusion is
partly enforced by Ash’s refusal to legitimize or publicize their clandestine relationship.
LaMotte is, in a sense, a victim of male hypocrisy, but she is able to convert her empty hours

4
of isolation into brilliant artistic moments of selfexpression. Her artistic bent is
betterdelineated than Sarah’s dubious presence in the PreRaphaelite circle.
Sarah is figured as a total outcast, without parents, relatives and friends in her youth.
She also bears the onus of a failed affair with a deceptive and married French sailor,
Varguennes. She is enlightened and better educated than most girls of her age and class and
has an interest in fossils. She knows French, good embroidery, contemporary literature and is
also able to fend for herself (See Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman 1992:33, 50-1,121-
22). With these accomplishments, she is more of marriage material than the modest Mrs
Talbot and the frivolous Ernestina. Sarah’s affair with Varguennes is a disastrous consequence
of her jealous dissatisfaction with Mrs Talbot’s happy family life (See Fowles, The French
Lieutenant’s Woman 1992:148).Craving for such happiness, an imagined perfection, she loves
Varguennes, the false and elusive French sailor. Thus, she essentially harbours the average
middleclass dream of happy domesticity. Being jilted, she invents her own image as the
ideal ‘other’, the fallen woman seeking selfostracism from Victorian respectable society.
She converts her marginality to a source of strength. Therefore, she seems to enjoy her
outsider’s status and does not feel embarrassed for being shamelessly fallen:

‘I am a doubly dishonoured woman. By circumstances. And by choice. …

What has kept me alive is my shame, my knowing that I am truly not like
other women. I shall never have children, a husband, and those innocent
happinesses they have. And they will never understand the reason for my
crime…Sometimes I almost pity them. I think I have a freedom they cannot
understand. No insult, no blame, can touch me. Because I have set myself
beyond the pale. I am nothing. I am hardly human any more. I am the French
Lieutenant’s Whore’. (Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman 1992 :152-
53, emphasis added)

Charles tries to offer her impersonal help, but this time Sarah wants nothing less because she
simply wants to possess him both physically and emotionally (See Fowles, The French
Lieutenant’s Woman 1992: 305-309). She wants neither marriage nor any permanent
commitment. She also fully gives in to the idea that marital bonding does not ensure
happiness and freedom (See Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman 1992: 305-309, 395-
99). Instead, she transfers her faith to an intuitive wisdom as a source of individual strength
and freedom.
Despite showing such resistance to Victorian gender stereotyping, the end she
achieves is not quite revolutionary and emancipatory. She does not turn out to be a social
leader/activist for the cause of feminism, but remains a fetishistic model for a voluptuous
artistic group and depends on them economically and professionally. Fowles denies her true
emancipatory potential, she is unable to preach her gospel of truth, spread her laws of
freedom and inspire other women. Fowles makes her the isolated crusader enjoying her own
liberty without getting any scope to join feminist activism in Victorian urban society. Sarah
remains the prototypical feminist envisioning gender equality, though unable to enjoy such
equality in reality. Fowles makes her a symbolic figure, who can at best provide inspiration to
contemporary feminists. It is not Sarah herself, but her evolutionary legatee, the twentieth-
century feminist, who carries the crusade against patriarchy to its climax. In other words,
Fowles by closely imitating or parodying Victorian liberal humanists like Mill and Hardy
remains a protofeminist, endorsing the rights of women and condemning the double
standard of Victorian patriarchy, but unable to suggest constructive alternatives to gender
stereotyping. Here, Fowles’s gender ideology also reflects some of the sexual and moral
ambivalence of the New Woman writers. According to Lyn Pykett, these female writers
‘simultaneously celebrate[d] the feminine and/as feeling, and problematise[d] the
conventional association of woman with feeling’ (1992:174). This new generation of
Victorian women wanted to paradoxically combine emotion and intellect in forging
experimental and more flexible, noncommittal heterosexual relationships. In the words of

5
Jill Larson, it was Sarah Grand, Thomas Hardy and Olive Schreiner, who critically depicted
‘the lateVictorian feminist as someone who [felt] as deeply as she [thought] and, in fact,
suffer[ed] because her emotions and ideas [were] so difficult to disentangle’ (2002: 169,
reference omitted). Their love lives were complicated by their desire for male love and the
ironical rejection of gender assumptions that produced such love (Larson 2002: 163).
Inevitably, experimenting with relationships earned them the status of flirts and whores, but
respectable Victorian women zealously avoided these labels (Larson 2002: 167-168). These
Victorian feminists were confronted with a realization of their aspirations and the
simultaneous inability to materialize them in an age not ripe enough for complete female
emancipation.
Fowles uses the conflict of emotions and intellect encountered by urbane Victorian
woman to demystify it. This ironically shows how such uncertainties in romance can only
breed anxiety and frustration, but cannot bring peace of mind and happiness. What Sarah
really achieves for herself is the simplest capacity to move in and out of heterosexual affairs.
But that cannot count for total freedom because she is free but alone. Even her fellow sisters
in bondage do not accept her credo, and consider her freaky and outlandish. The relative
impersonality she achieves in love is not reflected in her economic or cultural attitudes
because she still needs the patronage of a maledominated artistic group. Fowles’s heroine
shows the fatuity of individual resistance that cannot transform others. Fowles celebrates her
(fictional) achievement a hundred years later since in her own age her rebellious individuality
would have been either ignored or misunderstood. Her dilemmas are reflective of the many
contradictions that defined and determined the Victorian gender ideology. Fowles brings out
these ambiguities in the Victorian patriarchal psyche by indicating how intelligent and self-
willed women were perceived with doubt and suspicion in an age that ironically initiated and
promoted the Woman Question. His historical novel connects the many contradictions of the
Victorian gender ideology with a romantic narrative that both re-inforces and dismantles the
nineteenth-century patriarchal clichés about gender, love and marriage.

Notes

1. Robert Huffaker suggests that the character of Sarah Woodruff is particularly similar to
Sabine BaringGould’s Mehalah published in 1880 (1980: 91). For Fowles, Mehalah as
a ‘new woman’ of the lateVictorian period was ‘metaphorically trying to break from
the tight stay … of masculine wishful thinking about woman’s humble role in life’
(1991:102104). For a further discussion of sources used by Fowles see Eileen
Warburton (1996:165186). This essay explores the affinities between French
Lieutenant’s Woman, Claire de Duras’s Ourika (1823) and the fairy tale of Cinderella
(especially the versions of the Grimm Brothers and Perrault).
2. There are several conflicting interpretations of Fowles’s analysis of Victorian feminism
in the novel. Deborah Byrd considers him a supporter of Victorian feminism (1984:
306321). Magali Cornier Michael finds Sarah a victim of Fowles’s sexism (1987:
225236). Among other recent critics who criticize Fowles’s sexism, Margaret Bozenna
Goscilo thinks that Fowles is unable to contest the patriarchal gender politics of
Victorian society even by associating his ‘anomalous’ Sarah with the ‘countercultural’
PreRaphaelites because through Sarah’s eroticization (‘damsel in distress’ becoming
‘icon of beauty’, ‘tempting Eve’ and then ‘eternal Feminine’), he repeats the
PreRaphaelite aesthetic strategies of fetishization, stereotyping and dehumanization of
female beauty. For Goscilo, his identification with Victorian sexism makes his parody
‘strong on complicity and low on contestation’ (1993: 6382).

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3. The form of ‘historiographic metafiction’ allows the writer to paradoxically oppose the
very discourse he uses. Therefore, Fowles can use some of the tenets of Victorian
feminism and negate them (See Hutcheon, 1988: 37-54). Malcolm Bradbury has been
intrigued by the varied interpretations The French Lieutenant’s Woman is able to
suggest, by simultaneously being ‘a very Whig novel, a novel about emancipation
through history’ and ‘a great pastiche novel, a novel of ironic counterpointings’. (1978:
175).
4. James Acheson particularly notes this coincidence (1998: 33). If Fowles considers John
Stuart Mill his prototype on female emancipation then he is very much on dubious
grounds for Mill was a victim to many Victorian patriarchal prejudices. While,
paradoxically, he censured patriarchy and furthered female emancipation, in his typically
paternalistic style he prepared a prototype of an ideal woman, without even knowing
what to do with her. Fowles on granting Victorian women their rights and privileges
repeats some of these ambiguities. For a broader insight into Mill’s gender ideology see
Collini ed. 1989: 119217.
5. Refuting conventional criticism against Sarah’s idolization, Linda Hutcheon points out
that her entire liaison with Charles is planned, precisely executed and given both a tragic
and happy outcome solely by her decisions. Hutcheon is of the opinion that she is able to
command a hold upon Charles and take an upper hand in the relationship unlike most
Victorian women and, thereby, Sarah is the ‘prime mover’ and ‘architect’ of the romance
plot (1980: 5770).
6. Fowles has linked the twentieth-century concept of Existentialism with his Victorian
heroine. See William J. Palmer (1974) and John Neary (1992).

Works Cited

Acheson, James. John Fowles London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998

BaringGould, Sabine. Mehalah : A Story of the Salt Marshes (ed). John Fowles 1982; rpt.
London: Chatto and Windus, 1991
Bradbury, Malcolm. ‘The Novelist as Impresario: John Fowles’ reprinted in Stephen Hazell
(ed). The English Novel: Developments in Criticism since Henry James London and
Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1978
Byatt, A. S. Possession: A Romance 1990; rpt. London: Chatto and Windus, 1991
Byrd, Deborah. ‘The Evolution and Emancipation of Sarah Woodruff: The French
Lieutenant’s Woman as a Feminist Novel’, International Journal of Women’s Studies, 7: 4,
September, (1984): 306321
Fowles, John. The French Lieutenant’s Woman 1969; rpt. London: Picador, 1992
Goscilo, Margaret Bozenna, ‘John Fowles’s PreRaphaelite Woman: Interart Strategies and
Gender Politics’, Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, 26: 2,
(Spring 1993): 6382
Huffaker, John. John Fowles Boston: G.K. Hall and Twayne Publishers, 1980
Hutcheon, Linda. Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox London: Methuen, 1980
--------. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction London and New York :
Routledge, 1988
Larson, Jill. ‘Sexual Ethics in Fiction by Thomas Hardy and the New Woman Writers’ in
Alice Jenkins and Juliet John (eds) Rereading Victorian Fiction 2000; rpt. Basingstoke :
Palgrave Macmillan, 2002
Loveday, Simon. The Romances of John Fowles New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985

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Michael, Magali Cornier. “‘Who is Sarah?”: A Critique of The French Lieutenant’s Woman’s
Feminism’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 28: 4, (Summer 1987): 225236
Lynch, R. P. ‘Freedoms in The French Lieutenant’s Woman”, Twentieth-Century Literature,
48: 1, (Spring 2002): 51-70
Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty and Other Writings (ed). Stefan Collini Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989
Neary, John. Somethingness and Nothingness: The Fiction of John Updike and John Fowles
Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992
Palmer, William J. The Fiction of John Fowles: Tradition, Art and the Loneliness of Selfhood
Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1974
Pinter, Harold. The French Lieutenant’s Woman and Other Screenplays 1982; rpt. London:
Faber and Faber, 1991
Poovey, Mary. Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid Victorian
England 1988; rpt. London: Virago, 1989
Pykett, Lyn. The ‘Improper’ Feminine: The Women’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman
Writing London and New York: Routledge, 1992
Vipond, Dianne. ‘An Unholy Inquisition: John Fowles and Dianne Vipond’ in John Fowles,
Wormholes: Essays and Occasional Writings (ed). Jan Relf 1998; rpt. London: Vintage, 1999
Woodcock, Bruce. Male Mythologies: John Fowles and Masculinity Brighton: Harvester
Press, 1984
Warburton, Eileen. ‘Ashes, Ashes, We All Fall Down: Ourika, Cinderella and The French
Lieutenant’s Woman’, Twentieth Century Literature, John Fowles Special Issue, 42:1, (Spring
1996):165186

AUTHOR’S BRIEF PROFILE

Dr Sneha Kar Chaudhuri is Assistant Professor, Department of English, West Bengal

State University, Kolkata, India. A UGC-Senior Research Fellow with the Centre of
Advanced Study in English, Jadavpur University (2004-2008), she received her
doctoral degree in 2008; her thesis is on the various thematic dimensions of
postmodern neo-Victorian fiction. She is also the former Assistant Editor and current
Editorial Board member of the international peer-reviewed journal, Neo-Victorian
Studies, published by Swansea University, Wales, UK. She has published reviews and
articles in various peer-reviewed national and international journals and has made
seminar presentations in several national and international conferences in India and
abroad. Her co-edited volume tentatively entitled Tagore and Woman is coming out
from Stree-Samya, Kolkata in 2015.