ABSTRACT

The differences between John Fowles's and A. S. Byatt's transformations of Victorian endings return us to the dual approach of neo-Victorian fiction. Recognizing the extent to which Victorian endings reflected the historical conditions for women in the Victorian era, these novelists understand the need to transform those endings in their contemporary neo-Victorian novels. The way in which that transformation is achieved by Fowles and Byatt, however, reflects both their different approaches to the relationship between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the different contexts in which they were writing. In their transformations of Victorian endings, neo-Victorian fictions engage with a stereotypical view of Victorian endings as neat and fixed. Although Byatt's Possession brought neo-Victorian fiction to critical and popular attention, it was Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman that inaugurated the genre. The dual approach of neo-Victorian fiction is apparent in the structure of Fowles's novel, which presents a nineteenth-century plot through the frame of a twentieth-century narrator.