Unforgettable | Dave's Place

The French Lieutenant’s Woman a novel by John Fowles. Little, Brown and Company. 467 pp. *****

The French Lieutenant’s Woman was one of the favorite novels of my friend Levi, who had read it multiple times. In fact, I believe he gave me the copy I have, for my birthday or for Christmas; like most book lovers, he gave his favorite books. I’m always four or five books behind on my to-read list, which keeps expanding, and it somehow never included this novel, which has sat on my shelf at least since Levi’s death in 2017. I’ve now finally read it. I should have started it the day he gave it to me. It’s a great book.

It is essentially a 19^th century novel written by an author with a 20^th century sensibility. Weirdly, and disconcertingly, that author sometimes steps into the story and comments on it. He even once sits on the train in which the protagonist is traveling, the way Hitchcock appeared in his own movies. I would say also that the novel is about a 20^th century woman—one of the most intriguing women in English literature—trapped in a 19^th century world, and situation. Most of the people around her, with their quaint Victorian prejudices, seem mildly nuts. She seems the sane one.

The story is simple. Sarah Woodruff, while living in Lyme Regis, Dorset, is seduced and abandoned by a man who had been shipwrecked there, the French Lieutenant of the title. He told her that, after returning to France, he would come back to get her, but he never did, and she later found out he was married and never intended to return. It’s the old sad story, of an unprincipled man and a common woman who has no recourse once she has been used in that way. As the novel opens, she haunts the seacoast and stares out to sea, as if expecting his return any minute. At least that’s the story the townspeople tell each other.

She is discovered there by a man named Charles Smithson, who is in a carriage with his fiancé, a young woman named Ernestina Freeman who has heard the story the townspeople tell. Charles is worried that Sarah is in peril and goes to help her; she rebuffs him with a gaze that goes right through him, and tells him she doesn’t need his, or anyone else’s help. That stands in contrast to most young woman in Victorian England. He is intrigued.

Charles is a landowner and aristocrat who has not exactly fallen on hard times, but who has limited capital. Ernestina is the daughter of an extremely successful merchant, and will bring a large dowry and eventually inherit all that her father has. In that sense Charles is marrying beneath himself, perhaps with an eye on his bank account. But he genuinely loves Ernestina, and after having spent his early adulthood traveling all over the continent and having various adventures, he’s ready to settle down.

But he can’t get Sarah out of his mind. He also can’t get her out of his life, because on his various expeditions around the countryside—he has a strong interest in archaeology—he keeps running into her, and her intensely mournful countenance. Eventually he consults a local physician, Dr. Grogan, about the matter, and he says Sarah is suffering from melancholia. He believes it might help to tell her story to a sympathetic listener. Sarah has suggested as much to Charles, and sympathetic listeners aren’t readily available, in Dorset or anywhere else. The doctor does begin to suspect that Charles’ interest in the woman isn’t just therapeutic and warns him to be cautious for that reason. Charles ignores that part of his advice.

The reader has long since realized, maybe even since that first chapter, that Sarah is the woman for him.

The way all these things come about involves a complicated and suspenseful plot that has us on the edge of our seat at the same time that we want to read slowly because of the beauty and power of the prose. One stunning moment comes when—in contrast to what the townspeople believe—Sarah says that the French Lieutenant didn’t take advantage of her. “I gave myself to him.” She also seems amused by a romance that is going on between Charles’ servant Sam and a woman who waits on Ernestina. She seems to approve, in a society that says she should frown on it.

This reads like a truly great Victorian novel—with the occasional unsettling intrusion of our 20^th century narrator—and winds up in a place that suddenly does seem modern. It’s not a happy ending, but our characters have made a huge leap in self-awareness. Sarah still stands as an enigma but also as her own woman, who will live the way she wants to. It seems at times to be a novel about Charles. But in the end it’s Sarah who stays with us.