John Fowles

John Fowles was a British novelist whose The Magus, The French Lieutenant's Woman, and The Collector were among the most critically admired and widely read British novels of the 1960s and 1970s, each using postmodern techniques to explore freedom, obsession, and the nature of fiction itself.

John Fowles published The Collector in 1963, a psychologically chilling novel told in alternating voices — a working-class butterfly collector who kidnaps a young woman he has obsessively admired, and the woman herself — that was immediately recognized as something new in British fiction. The novel’s precision about the psychology of obsession and the gap between the collector’s self-image and his actions remains unsettling.

The Magus (1965, revised 1977) is his most ambitious and most debated novel: Nicholas Urfe, an English teacher on a Greek island, becomes entangled in an elaborate series of theatrical and psychological games organized by a wealthy Greek aesthete named Maurice Conchis. What is real, what is performance, what is psychological manipulation — the novel refuses to resolve these questions, and readers have been arguing about its ending since publication. Fowles himself regarded the revised version as significantly better than the original.

The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) is his most formally innovative novel: a Victorian historical romance whose narrator periodically breaks the fourth wall to acknowledge that he is an author in 1967 writing a Victorian novel, and who offers the reader multiple possible endings. The technique was daring in 1969 and has been widely imitated. Fowles taught at a grammar school in Dorset for most of his adult life and was a committed naturalist; the Dorset landscape runs through his fiction. He died in 2005; The Magus in particular retains a devoted readership among people who encounter it in their twenties.