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| A watercolour of Clare in Lyme Regis: June 2006 |
The English author John Fowles (1926-2005) wrote “The Magus” (1965); “The French Lieutenant's Woman” (1969) - a Victorian-era romance with a postmodern twist that was set in Lyme Regis, Dorset, where Fowles lived for much of his life; “The Ebony Tower” (1974); “Daniel Martin” (1977); “Mantissa” (1982); and “A Maggot” (1985).His biography: “John Fowles - A Life in Two Worlds” and his journals also aid in the reconstruction of John Fowles’s views and character.
I would add that my own favourite John Fowles novel is “Daniel Martin” which is a semi-autobiographical account of his Hollywood screenwriting years following the success of his earlier novels.
John Fowles was of the same generation as my father (1925-2009).
Me. It is said that it is difficult to be the wife of a (male) writer of literary fiction. You said somewhere that a writer is someone who doesn’t like their given reality very much, preferring the realities dreamt up within their own head. Many male writers’ thoughts naturally tend towards women and romantic/erotic encounters. You also said that, like many of your peers, you always fell in love with your female characters. Very Thomas Hardy!
And there was poor Elizabeth, your wife, doomed to hours of boredom downstairs while you were happily ensconced in your study writing thousands of words fantasising about your own ideal women, fantasies which she had to believe represented your ‘improvements’ upon her, while also stripping her of her privacy. Any comments?
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John Fowles: Indeed, Elizabeth bore a complex burden, one that I’ve often wrestled with myself—though perhaps not enough. Writers, especially those in the throes of constructing imagined worlds and complex characters, have a rather discomfiting tendency to neglect those closest to them, especially their partners. In her case, Elizabeth's sacrifice was the quiet tolerance of being not only the wife of a man often lost in fantasy but also someone whose love and life were continually mined, unwittingly and often unwillingly, for literary material.
I once said that writing is "an attempt to reach a reality I am denied in real life.” That statement acknowledges a painful truth: writing, especially for a male writer, can be an act of escapism—a selfish indulgence into the inner worlds of fantasy, love, and erotic idealizations. Elizabeth must have seen the life we shared as something like an exhibition hall where her own privacy, her own essence, was open to my ever-hungry gaze and, by extension, the world’s.
Yes, I fell in love with many of my characters, but it was a love entwined with my own limitations—a symptom of the yearning for some idealized, unattainable aspect of femininity. It was romantic, yes, but also escapist, immature, and, in some ways, quite selfish. I was aware that there was a cruelty to this process: Elizabeth could sense that in many ways she had to compete not with flesh-and-blood women, but with figments of my own imagination. And in this way, being the wife of a male writer is rather akin to loving a man who holds a mistress in his mind, and she is all the more unattainable and alluring for being his own creation.
You mention Hardy, and I do feel that kinship; his characters, like mine, were often born of a frustrated desire to reimagine or transcend his reality. He sought out, in his female characters, not only muses but ideals to save him from his everyday limitations. But the irony, of course, is that the more you pursue that imaginative escape, the more entangled you become in the harsh realities and pains of those who live alongside you.
Perhaps, in the end, what writers owe their partners is more than mere apology; they owe them a confrontation with reality—a willingness to relinquish the allure of imagined love and to confront the actual, flesh-and-blood work of loving another person. For me, this insight came possibly too late.
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Me. The recently deceased English writer, Martin Amis, characterised you as an author who many thought of as highbrow, but who was in reality merely middlebrow. How would you respond to that, both as a style of criticism and as regards its accuracy or otherwise?
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John Fowles: Ah, Amis—a writer of immense talent, though never one to shy away from the sharp barb. In his view, “middlebrow” implied a lack of true literary courage, perhaps a failure to push the boundaries of style, thought, or intellect. To him, my novels might have seemed to skirt the edge of the avant-garde but, in their structure and themes, remained too accessible, too “populist” to stand beside the more experimental works of his preferred literary pantheon.
But to be labelled “middlebrow” is more a comment on reception than on the intentions of the author. The distinction between high and middlebrow is largely arbitrary, rooted in a hierarchical model of taste that I find unnecessarily dismissive. I did not set out to write books that would please a particular class of reader or another. Rather, I sought to explore, often at length, human freedom, existential ambiguity, and the ways in which we are caught between destiny and self-determination.
The 'middlebrow' critique could be accurate in that I did not pursue complexity for complexity’s sake. Instead, I preferred psychological richness over linguistic experiment, felt an affinity for Victorian detail and the immersive quality of storytelling. Perhaps this made my work more digestible, but it was a deliberate choice. To make philosophical themes accessible without diluting them was always a goal, and it does not—at least in my estimation—diminish the ambition of my work.
I also believe there’s an intellectual laziness in these hierarchical labels, which reduce a book’s essence to some vague metric of “difficulty” or “literary sophistication”. Amis, for all his brilliance, could be rather enamoured of self-conscious cleverness. I was interested in ideas not for show, but for their impact on my characters' lives, and through them, on my readers. In "The Magus", "The French Lieutenant’s Woman", and "Daniel Martin", I wanted to construct complex emotional landscapes where the readers could see themselves reflected, not merely a conceptual hall of mirrors.
In the end, I stand by the choices I made. If that relegates me to “middlebrow” in some circles, so be it. But let it also be acknowledged that literary merit resides as much in authenticity and psychological insight as in structural novelty.
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Me. In Myers-Briggs terms, I have always thought of you as an INTP. There is the restless curiosity about everything, the evidence in your writing of a very rational mind, unencumbered by popular shibboleths. You disdained conventional elite society in London, preferring an arid systematising ‘career’ at Lyme Regis Museum. Finally I would note your great interest in the psychoanalytic theories of Freud and Jung.
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John Fowles: An INTP, you say? There’s something rather satisfying in that description, and I imagine the young, solitary boy in me would have felt a touch vindicated, as well. I certainly felt that restlessness, that compulsion to pry open the familiar to peer at what lies beneath. My curiosity was not just intellectual—it was ontological, driven by a desire to challenge the very nature of reality, to peel back the layers that most accept without question. I wanted to know 'why' things were, what hidden mechanisms drove human behavior, and to unearth those subtle, sometimes uncomfortable truths that define our existence. An INTP label does ring true in this sense: rational, indeed, but also subversive, a trait that led me to feel alienated from the cliques and hierarchy of London’s literary society.
My 'career' in the Lyme Regis Museum, with its bones, fossils, and local histories, was something of an intentional retreat into a simpler, even meditative world. It was less about disdain for the elites—though I had my reservations about the performative intellectualism of the metropolis—and more about the solace I found in removing myself from the competitive and judgmental currents of that world. I have always preferred the authenticity of my own pursuits to being pulled into the expectations of others.
As for my interest in Freud and Jung, it was not only that their theories fascinated me; it was that they gave structure and language to the deep, often irrational forces that shape us. Jung’s notion of archetypes, for instance, was an idea that could play out in "The Magus" and "Daniel Martin", where the characters are propelled by unconscious forces and personal mythologies. I gravitated toward these ideas because they offered a framework within which I could better understand myself and my characters, placing our individual struggles within a broader human narrative.
The INTP label, if nothing else, captures the desire for intellectual freedom and the impulse to remain unbound by conventions or norms. I am, in a sense, the perennial outsider, always examining and observing rather than immersing myself. But in that distance, I find clarity—a vantage point from which the contradictions and complexities of life can reveal themselves fully.
