John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds

John Fowles has been compared to Henry James and Virginia Woolf. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in The New York Timeshailed him as “a remarkable novelist,” and the novelist John Gardner described him as “the only writer in English who has the power, range, knowledge, and wisdom of a Tolstoy.” Four of his works have been adapted for film, including the Academy Award–nominated The French Lieutenant’s Woman.

Despite his immense critical and popular success, only now has Fowles found the capable biographer he has long deserved. In John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds, Eileen Warburton provides a richly detailed portrait that emphasizes his emergence as one the twentieth century’s most important writers. She chronicles his prewar childhood in a London commuter town and in wartime rural England, his Oxford education, and his apprentice years in Europe and London. From a lifetime of intimate correspondence, she narrates Fowles’s thirty-seven-year love affair with the wife who inspired his most memorable women characters. And she follows the astonishing trajectory of Fowles’s long writing career—from his spectacular debut novel, The Collector(1963), to the haunting The French Lieutenant’s Woman(1969), through his later fiction, poems, essays, and translations.