ABSTRACT
The French Lieutenant’s Woman could be said to examine the literary tradition in which John Fowles’s storytelling technique and narrative drive have one origin. The story, therefore, like ‘The Ebony Tower’, refers to the disruption of the line of artistic and cultural filiation, and speaks of the ways in which the authority of the text itself authenticates the reading self, or fails to do so. Fowles has paid his respects to the detective tale elsewhere, and ‘The Enigma’, which after ‘The Ebony Tower’ is one of the collection’s most successful stories, is also an ironic tribute to the genre. Fowles has elsewhere distinguished the public British face of jingoism and cant from the private English search for justice in the greenwood; it is a thesis much elaborated in Daniel Martin too. The absconding of the Fowlesian narrator, like that of the authoritarian God, and of the worldly Fielding, is done with unusual delicacy.
