The French Lieutenant's Woman The French Lieutenant's Woman The French Lieutenant's Woman is a 1969 postmodern historical fiction novel by John Fowles. It was his third published novel, after "The Collector" (1963) and "The Magus" (1965). The novel explores the fraught relationship of gentleman and amateur naturalist Charles Smithson and Sarah Woodruff, the former governess and independent woman with whom he falls in love. The novel builds on Fowles' authority in Victorian literature, both following and critiquing many of the conventions of period novels. Following publication, the library magazine "American Libraries," described the novel as one of the "Notable Books of 1969". Subsequent to
The French Lieutenant's Woman and Spanish. The novel was originally published in 1969 by Little Brown and Company in both Boston and Toronto. The novel has also been published in a number of English editions from different publishers, represented in the following list (with publication date in parenthesis): The general popularity of "The French Lieutenant's Woman" has inspired several responses to the novel, most notably other authors' work and adaptation into film and theatre. The most prominent response to the novel is A.S. Byatt's 1990 Booker Prize-winning novel, "Possession". She describes her novel as deliberately responding to the model of postmodern metafiction that critics