The third ending

It is the most beautiful, though Charles and Sarah are not reconciled and reunited.

The French Lieutenant's Woman.

The second ending

Charles is a jackass.

He barely knows Sarah, and all she has done is lie to him.

His last word from her is refusal of him.

Yet he rejects Ernestina, to both their profound harms, on a baseless hope that, once Tina is rejected, Sarah will accept him and he and she will be happy ever after.

He eventually finds her, and it appears they are reunited in the end, anyway.

A happy ending.

But not the last.

Reading The French Lieutenant's Woman.

What a breathtaking Ego!

Fowles, lecturing page after page . . . after page on the hearts, the souls, the minds, and above all the sex lives of the Victorians.

Oh, my.

The French Lieutenant's Woman.

Like Tolstoy blathering about history in War and Peace, ruining a wonderful novel.

Or Hugo in The Hunchback.

Hysteria

Fowles' narrator, a man of his (Fowles') time, has considerable respect for Freud and attributes hysteria to sexual repression in Chapter 28, a report of the La Ronciere case of 1835.

Another generation advised that masturbation causes warts, impotence, sterility, homosexuality, and even insanity.

Much as poverty causes crime, war, and even Jihad.

Reading The French Lieutenant's Woman.

Our author quotes Hardy and Clough, Marx and Freud.

And Tennyson more than anyone.

But never once, so far, Nietzsche, Leopardi, or Schopenhauer.

Grogan is perceptive and enlightened, but

In chapter 27, he explains to Charles he has been led by the nose.

But he refers to the clients of prostitutes as victims.

But according to feminist dogma and the CMW it has made, the prostitutes are the victims and the clients, or capitalism, or patriarchy the victmizer.

He intends to put Sarah in an asylum.

How horrifying.

And Charles agrees!

Reading The French Lieutenant's Woman.

An extraordinary deception

By the time we get to the end of chapter nineteen, we know Sarah's bitter isolation in her everlasting role of fallen woman is actually a choice motivated by her unyielding rejection of the only legitimate social roles available to her, of their low status and wealth and narrow cultural prospects.

In chapter twenty, she tells her tale to Charles, reinforcing that perception and painting herself as having quite freely and knowingly given herself to the French officer, Varguennes, though fully aware they would not have, and he never intended, a future together.

This is supposed to be a frank account of her notorious fall.

What Charles does not discover until much later is that she is lying and remains a virgin.

But what is the actual scope of her lies?

Did she even actually run off to join the Frenchman briefly in Weymouth, the alleged scene of her alleged fall?

As no one can bear witness any relationship at all developed between her and the officer while he recovered from his shipwreck at the Talbots', was there in reality any such thing?

Reading The French Lieutenant's Woman.

A brilliant scene

At the end of chapter 12, Charles proposes to Ernestina.

What a fine touch.

Reading The French Lieutenant's Woman.

Ware Commons

My God, what a vocabulary of names of trees, grasses, brush, and wildflowers.

It would take an hour to look them all up.

So I won't.

Reading The French Lieutenant's Woman.

Reading John Fowles

Published in 1969, I first read The French Lieutenant's Woman while still in college, at Holy Cross, in Worcester, Massachusetts.

I have not read it since.

But now in retirement I had come to vaguely recall Fowles' meditations on the English Victorian Age, with its adagio time signature (Fowles' own description), its Christian prudery, its London full of whores, its Darwinism, its desperate lower classes, and its idle rich.

Meditations made especially timely - especially those about leisure, laziness, and his hero "adrift in the slow entire of Victorian time" - by the real or aspirational leisure of the principal characters of Tom Jones and Moll Flanders, both of which I had recently read.

And my own newfound leisure.

So I thought I would read it again.

And I must say his prose is a perfect fit for this book.

Wonderful.

I have had leisure that felt like this only twice before in my life.

In the long summer days of childhood, perhaps at 5 or 7, at my grandparents' house.

And in the year I spent golfing and reading between the army and grad school.

I read The World as Will and Representation that year.

And War and Peace.

And Anna Karenina.

And more.

I read Being and Time the winter vacation of my first year in graduate school.

You can do a lot of reading of some very long books when time slows down.