Perhaps the most beloved of Fowles’s internationally bestselling works, The French Lieutenant’s Woman is a feat of seductive storytelling that effectively invents anew the Victorian novel. "Filled with enchanting mysteries and magically erotic possibilities" (New York Times), the novel inspired the hugely successful 1981 film starring Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons and is today universally regarded as a modern classic. 

          "The French Lieutenant’s Woman" not only is it the epic love story of two people of insight and imagination seeking escape from the cant and tyranny of their age, "The French Lieutenant’s Woman" is also a brilliantly sustained allegory of the decline of the twentieth-century passion for freedom.