FOWLES, John. The French Lieutenant’s Woman. London: Jonathan Cape. 1969.
8vo. Original brown cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, in the dustwrapper with typography by Adrian Brewin and endpapers with a drawing by Tom Adams; pp. 445, [3]; light toning to page block, tiny nick to lower edge of one page, dustwrapper rubbed to upper spine tip and corners and lightly toned to spine; a near fine copy in a very good wrapper; inscribed by the author in black ink to the half title.
An inscribed first edition, first printing of a Victorian novel that could only have been written in the 1960s.
In his essay “Notes on an Unfinished Novel” (Harper’s Magazine, July 1968) written, as the title suggests, while writing this novel (it was at the time only provisionally entitled The French Lieutenant's Woman), Fowles notes that he “do[esn’t] think of it as a historical novel, a genre in which I have very little interest.” The very first paragraph, however, locates the action “at Lyme Regis […] one incisively sharp and blustery morning in the late March of 1867”, exactly 100 years before Fowles was writing.
The epigraph for the first chapter is taken from Hardy’s poem “The Riddle”, and the capsule summary printed on the cover of the current paperback edition of the book reads as if it were describing a Hardy novel: “Charles Smithson, a respectable engaged man, meets Sarah Woodruff as she stands on the Cobb at Lyme Regis, staring out to sea. Charles falls in love, but Sarah is a disgraced woman, and their romance will defy all the stifling conventions of the Victorian age.” But that is where the resemblance ends; The French Lieutenant's Woman is very much a novel of 1967, where its narrator is undisguisedly located, sometimes subtly, sometimes more explicitly. In Chapter 13, we are informed that:
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.
Such conceits might become tiresome, but here they seem natural, the narrative unfolding with the assurance and inevitability of a nineteenth-century novel. In the Harper's essay, Fowles cites Thackeray, noting his deft use of voice, “characteristic teasing of the reader, [and] compensatory self-mocking” as precedents for his own methods (it may be the only example of Thackeray and Alain Robbe-Grillet being discussed in relation to one another).
This copy is warmly inscribed and dated by Fowles to one Pearl Goldwater, “whom the author will remember meeting”.
SKU: 2123957