THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN

London: Jonathan Cape, 1969. First edition. Very good plus in very good plus jacket.. Handsome first printing of Fowles's postmodern evocation of the Victorian novel. Fowles's third published novel and one of his most influential, THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN is both an attempted replica of and a splintered postmodern experiment upon Victorian fiction and its narrative conventions. With the freedom of the far future to shift registers and let implications rest where they may ("Mr. Fowles clearly knows his Victorian pornographers," wrote one contemporary reviewer, approvingly) and the skill to mimic the absent but all-knowing 19th-century narration no longer in fashion, Fowles ultimately declines to manufacture a strict period piece: bringing in his own person as metafictional commentator, he refuses to settle the "fixed fight" of fiction in the traditional definitive manner, instead offering two endings whose order of presentation is (or so he says) determined by the flip of a coin.

The 1981 film of the novel was adapted by Harold Pinter, who added another layer of cinematic self-reference to the plot, and starred Jeremy Irons and Meryl Streep in what might have been a career-making role had her career not already been made. In any case, she won an Academy Award for her troubles, in spite of Pauline Kael's grumbles about the film's glacial detachment. If this is a flaw, it is a deliberate one, and one shared by Fowles's novel, for which distance is a recurring concern: emotional, temporal, geographical distance; the distance between a novel and a novelist, the distances between people unbridged by mutual understanding. 7.75'' x 5.5''. Original textured brown paper boards. Burgundy topstain. Pictorial endpapers by Tom Adams. In original unclipped (35s) gilt-lettered burgundy jacket. 445, [1] pages. Moderate scuffing to jacket edges and folds, minor spotting to fore-edge. Topstain dark.