John Robert Fowles

John Robert Fowles (1926 –2005)

 John Fowles was born at Leighton-on-Sea, Essex in 1926, where he lived until the outbreak of the Second World War.

 He was educated at Bedford School and New College, Oxford, where he read French and German. After graduating he taught English at the University of Poitiers and then at the Anagyriou School at Spetses. He became a full-time writer in 1963.

 His first novel, The Collector (1963), a psychological thriller, the story of a young clerk, a  butterfly collector, who kidnaps a young female art student.

 This was followed by The Magus (1966), set on a Greek island of Phraxos where a schoolteacher is drawn into a series of elaborate psychological games in which illusion and reality become  difficult to differentiate.

 The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969), a formally experimental novel that tells the tale of Victorian paleontologist Charles Smithson and his involvement with the notorious and enigmatic Sarah Woodruff. An example of Fowles’s original style, the book combined elements of the Victorian novel with postmodern works and featured alternate endings. The French Lieutenant's Woman won the Silver Pen Award and the WH Smith Literary Award and was adapted as a film in 1981 with a screenplay by Harold Pinter.

 Daniel Martin (1977) is a long, semi-naturalistic, semi-experimental account of a screenwriter and his relationships with Hollywood, capitalism, art and his sister- in –law.

 Mantissa (1982) is an erotic fantasy in which a novelist hospitalized with amnesia imaginesvencounters with Erato, Muse of love poetry.

 Fowle’s last novel A Maggot (1985) reworks a real life 18th century murder mystery.

 John Fowles lived in Lyme Regis in Dorset on the south coast of England and was for a period curator of the local museum. He was an avid collector of old books and china and a fascinated student of fossils.

 The Tree, published in 1992, is partly a memoir of childhood and explores Fowles' enduring love of nature.

 He also published a Short History of Lyme Regis in 1982 and was the editor of Thomas Hardy's England (1984).

 His last book, The Journals: Volume 1 (2003), is the first volume of the journal he began as a student at Oxford in the late 1940s and continued over the next half century.