The French Lieutenant's Woman

The French Lieutenant's Woman is a novel by John Fowles, first published in 1969. It was his third book, following The Collector (1963) and The Magus (1965), and it went on to appear in many editions and in translation.

The story follows Charles Smithson, a gentleman and an amateur naturalist, and Sarah Woodruff, the former governess whose reputation has been destroyed and who is known locally as the French Lieutenant's Woman. Fowles writes their relationship in the manner of a period novel and comments on that manner as he goes, so the book both uses and examines the conventions of nineteenth-century fiction, drawing on his own knowledge of Victorian literature as it does so.

That doubled approach is what the novel is best known for. Readers and critics have taken it up as an example of historiographic metafiction and discussed it in terms of historiography, Marxist criticism and feminism as well as for its love story, American Libraries counted it among the notable books of 1969, and Time later placed it among the hundred best English-language novels published since the magazine began.