ABSTRACT
John Fowles is an immensely popular writer, one of whose novels, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, rapidly became a set text in universities. He writes romances, gothic stories that exploit the ancient erotic sources and opportunities of narrative and whose designs on the reader are palpable; and through which a series of Persecuted Maidens and princesses lointaines are pursued and prompted, like the mystical and psychological truths they embody, to deny the text that closure they seek. The spatialization of the relations between romance and realism, which Henry James goes on to develop, is a mode of vision natural to Fowles too: romance is conceived of as a mode of levitation. But Fowles is himself a romantic artist as well as a writer utilizing the romance tradition, and for romantic artists, as W. H. Auden wittily put it, ‘the Boojum [is] waiting at the next cross-roads where they will be asked whether or not they have become their actual selves.’
