Synopses & Reviews
Based on exclusive access to John Fowles's fifty-year private diary, personal letters, and interviews the first biography of the celebrated author of
The French Lieutenant's Woman.
John Fowles has been compared to Henry James and Virginia Woolf. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in the New York Times hailed 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 Awardnominated 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.
Review
"Illuminating....A hard-working life of a hard-working, justly honored writer, very well told." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"What we miss...is the triangulation of distance and a second voice: the snail trail along which the biographer struggles to patch what is missing and to reckon at what she cannot know. Biography is not just its subject but the journey toward it." Richard Eder, The New York Times Book Review
Review
"[An] exhilarating, exhaustive and entertaining biography." The Washington Post
Synopsis
Based on exclusive access to Fowles's 50-year private diary, personal letters, and interviews this is the first biography of the celebrated novelist of The French Lieutenant's Woman.
About the Author
Eileen Warburton is a scholar who lives in Newport, Rhode Island.
Table of Contents
Introduction · ix
chapter one: voices in the garden · 1
Leigh-on-Sea: 19261939
chapter two: the greenness at the heart of our growth · 21
Bedford, Devon: 19391944; Royal Marines: 19441946
chapter three: a larger world · 46
Oxford and Early Travels: 19471950
chapter four: in the land of illusions infantiles · 71
Poitiers: 19501951
chapter five: an island and greece · 89
Spetsai and Spain: 1952
chapter six: elizabeth and roy · 109
Greece: 19521953
chapter seven: anna · 133
London, Oxford, Birmingham, Ashridge: 19531954
chapter eight: the lily and the rose · 156
Ashridge and London: 19531954
chapter nine: the waiting room · 178
Apprenticeship in Hampstead: 19541957
chapter ten: a writer unpublished · 199
Hampstead: 19571962
chapter eleven: straight to the top of parnassus · 223
London, Greece, New York: 19621963
chapter twelve: the savage eye · 244
London, Hollywood: 19631965
chapter thirteen: the fox at bay · 262
Highgate: 19641965
chapter fourteen: the domaine · 279
Underhill Farm: 19651968
chapter fifteen: cast out · 306
Belmont House: 19691971
chapter sixteen: the hedgehog · 331
Belmont House: 19701974
chapter seventeen: on the island of daniel martin · 356
Belmont and Other Islands: 19731977
chapter eighteen: the consolations of the past · 381
Lyme Regis: 19771981
chapter nineteen: here be dragons · 407
19821990
chapter twenty: tendresse · 438
Domaine perdu and Afterward: 19902000
Notes · 463
Index · 495