English novelist and essayist, master of layered story-telling, illusionism, and purposefully ambiguous endings. John Fowles's best-known novels include The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969), adapted into screen in 1981, and The Magus (1965), which has gained a cult status. His protagonists must often confront their past, self-delusions and illusions, in order to gain their personal freedom or peace of mind.

"I cannot tell you how, but I knew he was lying. One of the great fallacies of our time is that the Nazis rose to power because they imposed order on chaos. Precisely the opposite is true—they were successful because they imposed chaos on order. They tore up the commandments, they denied the super-ego, what you will. They said, 'You may persecute the minority, you may kill, you may torture, you may couple and breed without love.' They offered humanity all its great temptations. Nothing is true, everything is permitted." (from The Magus: A Revised Version, New York: Dell Publishing, 1978, p. 435)

John Fowles was born in Leigh-on-Sea, in the south-east of England, the son of Robert Fowles, a prosperous cigar merchant, and Gladys Richards Fowles. "The rows of respectable little houses inhabited by respectable little people had an early depressive effect on me and I believe that they caused my intense and continuing dislike of mankind en masse," he once said. (The Romances of John Fowles by Simon Loveday, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985, p. 155) Fowles's favorite book as a boy was Richard Jefferies's Bevis (1882).

Fowles was educated at Alleyn Court School and Bedford School. Later Fowles regretted that as a captain of prefects at Bedford School he allowed himself to exercise tyranny over the younger boys. "Being head boy was a weird experience," he said. "You had total power over 800 other boys; you were totally responsible for discipline and punishment. I spent my 18th year holding court really. . . . Very evil, I think. Terrible system." ('John Fowles, Alone But Not Lonely' by Richard Boston, The New York Times, November 9, 1969) During World War II his family evacuated to a small Devonshire village near Dartmoor. In 1944 he entered the University of Edinburgh. Between the years 1945 and 1946, Fowles served in the Royal Marines. He then studied at New College, Oxford, French, and German languages and literature. While at Oxford, Fowles was much influenced by the French Existentialism, the most fashionable philosophical movement at that time.

After receiving his B.A. in 1950, Fowles worked as a teacher at the University of Poitiers in France, and at a boys' school at Anargyrios College on the Greek island Spetsai. There he met his future wife, Elisabeth Whitton; they married in 1956. In England Fowles continued his career as a teacher at Ashridge College (1953-54) and at St. Godric's College (1954-63). He also worked on many writing projects, including a novel, The Magus, that he continued to revise for 13 years.

"I have in any case no memory at all for novels, for their ideas, plots and characters. I could not even reconstitute my own with any accuracy if I were obliged to. I suppose I read as I write. I live the directs and present experience very intensely; but when it is over, it sinks very rapidly out of sight." (Fowles in 'Of Memoirs and Magpies,' The Atlantic Monthly, June 1975)

As a novelist Fowles made his debut awith The Collector (1963), a mixture of thriller and an analysis of class conflict. Before its publication, Jud Kinberg and John Kohn, former television writers, purchased the screenrights of the book. William Wyler agreed to direct the picture. "I found I couldn't put the book down," he recalled. "And I'm a man who can put books down very easily." (A Talent For Trouble: The Life Of Hollywood's Most Acclaimed Director, William Wyler by Jan Herman, New York: Da Capo Press, 1997, p. 421)

The Collector gained a huge success and enabled Fowles to devote himself entirely to writing. The narrative alternates between the viewpoints of the two protagonists, Freddie Clegg, is in his middle twenties, orphaned child, and a collector of butterflies. After winning a national football lottery, he uses his winnings to purchase a secluded Tudor mansion with a fortresslike cellar. He kidnaps and imprisons a young woman, Miranda Grey, a lively and strong-willed art student. Miranda, whose name refers to Prosperos daughter in Shakespeare's play The Tempest, keeps a diary, records their conversations, and plans her escape, while Clegg wants to win her "respect." She gains small victories, calls Freddie "Caliban," and dies without her freedom. At the finale the collector plays with the idea of repeating his performance.

In an interview Fowles said that he wanted to illustrate with terms of the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heracleitus the opposition of the Few and the Many: the Many are the stupid, the ignorant, and the easily molded. The Few are the good, the intelligent, the independent. (Fowles in Conversations with John Fowles, edited by Dianne L. Vipond, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999, p. 1) In the novel the boy stood for the Many, and the girl for the Few. 

The story had two sources. Fowles had seen a performance of Bartók's Bluebeard's Castle, in which a man imprisoned women underground, and he had read a true story of a London boy, who captured a girl and kept her several moths in an air-raid shelter. Clegg's narrative provides the frame of the story, but Fowles offers also Miranda's point of view, her diary. In the film version Terence Stamp played Clegg, although he first thought the character was impossible for him. Samantha Eggar did not have much acting experience, but she got the role of Miranda. Stanley Mann and John Kohn wrote the screenplay. John Fowles, who found the script "a pleasant surprise," doctored some dialogue. Wyler also followed Fowles's suggestion and eliminated all the background music in the kidnap sequence. The French composer Maurice Jarre scored the film. In the Village Voice Andrew Sarris called The Collector "the most erotic movie ever to come out past the Production Code", but said that Wyler's direction was "horribly impersonal." (A Talent For Trouble: The Life Of Hollywood's Most Acclaimed Director, William Wyler, p. 429)

Fowles's second novel, The Magus, drew from Shakespeare's The Tempest. It is a story about Nicholas Urfe, who escapes his latest love affair on the Greek island of Phraxos. There he meets the demonic millionaire Maurice Conchis, an ingenious trickster, the Prospero of the tale, and falls in love with Lily, Conchis's dead fiancée or an actress portraying her. Conchis is the master of magic and hallucinations in the "Godgame", into which Urfe is drawn. Fowles interweaves in the story Greek myths, psychoanalysis, Nazis, and shifting explanations of the mysterious events. "What was I after all? Near enough what Conchis had had me told: nothing but the net sum of countless wrong turnings. I dismissed most of the Freudian jargon of the trial; but all my life I had turned life into fiction, to hold reality away," Urfe thinks. (Ibid., p. 549) Finally Urfe breaks free from Conchis's power, and chooses reality over fabulation. However, when Fowles published the revised version twelve years later, this point is left more ambiguous. The novel ends with a quotation from The Pervigilium Veneris (The Virgil of Venus): "cras amet qui numquam amavit / quique amavit cras amet". (Ibid., p. 668; "Let those love now, who never loved before, / Let those who always loved, now love the more." - Translated by Thomas Parnell) The quote doesn't shed any light to the events that took in the island. The reader is left with the feeling that at the end of his experiences Urfe hasn't changed much ‒ he remains as self-centered as he was in the past.

Fowles's draft title for the book was originally "The Godgame." He began writing the work in the early 1950s. Both narrative and mood went through countless transformations. In the novel he acknowledged the influence of psychologist Carl Jung, and such literary models as Henry James's The Turn of the Screw and Charles Dickens's Great Expectations. The philosophical background of Fowles' works of the 1960s was in existentialism. In an interview with James Campbel in 1974, Fowles said that Sartre and Camus were among his main influences. "Most of my major characters have been involved in this Sartrean concept of authenticity and inauthenticity." ('The 1960s Existential Fiction of John Fowles' by Michelle Phillips Buchberger, in The 1960s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction, edited by Philip Tew, James Riley and Melanie Seddon, 2018, p. 165)

Guy Green's screen adaptation of The Magus was a huge disappointment for the author. There was, Fowles mourned, no poetry, no mystery, "just Caine, the bestpaid European filmstar, drifting through a role he doesn't understand."  Due to its metafictional nature, The French Lieutenant's Woman was said to be impossible to translate to film. Karel Reiz's screen version from 1981, starring Meryl Streep as Sarah and Jeremy Irons as Charles, followed Fowles's storyline, but the modern subplot, a film within a film, was created by the director and Harold Pinter, who wrote the screenplay. A clapperboard in the opening shot sets the tone of the adaptation – "the film violated mainstream Hollywood narrative conventions by showing the painstaking behind-the-scenes preparations that go into creating the illusion of spontaneous action for the camera: Anna, in her Sarah costuming, checks he makeup in a hand mirror; a clapboard indemtifies the scene as the opening shot of The French Lieutenant's Woman. . . . Reiz's film manages to have both a happy and unhappy ending by reuniting Charles and Sarah in a far more definitive fashion than Fowles does in the novel". (The Encyclopedia of Novels into Film by John C. Tibbetts, James M. Welsh, foreword by Robert Wise, New York: Checkmark Books, second edition, 2005, pp. 144-145) "There was trouble with the proposal scene," wrote Fowles in his journal, "and one day Karel rang me up to see if I could help - he felt it was too curt and quick. 'Harold says he'll do anything, but he simply can't write a happy scene.'" (The Journals: Volume 2: 1966-1990 by John Fowles, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005, p. 251)

Before them Fred Zinneman had planned to direct a film based on the book, but he did not find the right actress for the title role. The script was written by Dennis Potter. Also the directors Mike Nichols and Franklin Schaffner wrestled for a short with their own versions. Fowles had little to do with the production. Reisz later said that for him the project came alive when Meryl Streep was signed. Jeremy Irons played Charles, who tries to solve the mystery of the elusive Sarah. Irons later claimed that they had a brief love affair that ended when the filming ended. (Retakes: Behind the Scenes of 500 Classic Movies by John Eastman, New York: Ballantine Books, 1989, p. 113) At first Fowles had wanted Vanessa Redgrave for the dual roles of Sarah and Anna.

The French Lieutenant's Woman, set largely in Lyme Regis in the 1860s, re-created the Victorian melodrama and the world of Thomas Hardy. Jane Austen's novel Persuasion (1817) was in part set in this coastal resort, famous for its fossils. ". . . and a very strange stranger it must be, who does not see charms in the immediate environs of Lyme, to make him wish to know it better. The scenes in its neighbourhood, Charmouth, with its high grounds and extensive sweeps of country, and still more its sweet retired bay, backed by dark cliffs, where fragments of low rock among the sands make it the happiest spot for watching the flow of the tide, for sitting in unwearied contemplation; the wooded varieties of the cheerful village of Up Lyme; and, above, all, Pinny, with its green chasms between romantic rocks, where the scattered forest-trees and orchards of luxuriant growth declare that many a generation must have passed away since the first partial falling of the cliff prepared the ground for such a state, where a scene so wonderful and lovely is exhibited, as may more than equal any of the resembling scenes of the far-famed Isle of Wight: these places must be visited, and visited again to make the worth of Lyme understood." (Persuasion by Jane Austen, Edinburgh: John Grant, 1905, pp. 139-140) Alfred Lord Tennyson walked from Bridport to Lyme in 1867.

The novel grew out of a dream the author had of a woman standing at the edge of a quay, looking out to sea. A wealthy amateur paleontologist Charles Smithson, a supporter of Darwin's evolution theory, falls in love with Sarah Woodruff. She is a passionate and imaginative governess, who is believed to have been deserted by a French naval lieutenant. This affair has ostracized her from society. Another woman in Charles's life is Ernestina Freeman, whose conformity contrasts to Sarah's rebelliousness. Fowles moves between past and present, adds footnotes, quotations from Darwin, Marx, and the greats Victorian poets, and comments Victorian politics and customs. This experimental, self-conscious novel has different endings, one heart-warming, another shocking. "In some ways the unhappy ending pleases the novelist. He has set out on a voyage and announced, I have failed and must set out again. If you create a happy ending, there is a somewhat false sense of having solved life's problems." (Fowles in The New York Times, November 13, 1977)

Daniel Martin (1977) was about an English screenwriter's search for himself in his past. But the work is also full of observations on aesthetics, philosophy, cultural history, the difference between Britain and the United States, archeology, myth. Fowles described Daniel Martin as "a very long novel about Englishness." At one point the protagonist compares differences between written word and films: "Images are inherently fascistic because they overstamp the truth, however dim and blurred, of the real past experience; as if, faced with ruins, we must turn architects, not archeologists. The word is the most imprecise of signs. Only a science-obsessed age could fail to comprehend that this is its great virtue, not its defect." (Daniel Martin, Toronto: Totem Book, 1983, p. 90) Daniel is engaged to Nell but he realizes that he loves his sister Jane.

With the murder mystery A Maggot (1985) Fowles returned to the layered narrative of The Magus, but the structure of the novel has also some sort of literary connection with Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone (1868). A group of five people travels in Devon in 1736. After a night's lodging, they continue their journey - and disappear. During the following investigation conducted by Henry Ayscough, three members of the group are found, but their testimonies lead to a miracle and a disturbing vision of a contact with travellers from the future. "There are two truths," concludes Ayscough's clerk. "One that a person believes in truth; and one that is truth incontestible." (A Maggot, London: Picador, 1991, p. 348) The account of the former prostitute Rebecca Lee, the most important witness, who has undergone a religious conversion, only adds to the confusion. Although Fowles's sceptic view is obvious, he also gives room for a religious interpretation of the mystical events.

In 1966, Fowles moved with his wife Elisabeth to Dorset. They lived first at Unerhill Farm and then settled to a cliff-top house by the sea in a southern town called Lyme Regis. Fowles was appointed in 1978 joint honorary curator of the Lyme Regis Museum, and from 1979 to 1988 he was the sole honorary curator.

Elisabeth Fowles died of cancer in 1990. Gaining a reputation of "a cantankerous man of letters," Fowles lived quietly in Lyme. He spoke in an English public-school voice,  which he punctuated with such gap-fillers as "you know," "I mean," and "sort of." ('An  Interview with John Fowles,' conducted by James Campbell, Contemporary Literature, Vol. 17, No. 4, Autumn, 1976) In America, Fowles' books were read in college literary courses. Fowles died at his home in 2005 at the age of 79. He was survived by his second wife, Sarah Smith, whom he married in 1998. Fowles published also several nonfiction about Lyme Regis. His other works include poems, short stories, and essays. The Tree (1992) contains recollections of Fowles's childhood and explores the impact of nature on his life. Fowles wrote  poetry throughout his life; much of it remains unpublished. His translation of Molière's Dom Juan for the National Theatre was produced in 1981.

"If I were to specify my aims in life," Fowles said in an early interview, "I'd first of all like to be a good poet, then a sound philosopher, then a good novelist." (John Fowles by Barry N. Olshen, New York: Frederick Ungar Publishiung, 1978, p. 2) The author's philosophical basis for much of his work can be discerned in his early collection of notes and aphorisms, The Ariosto (1964), originally subtitled "A Self-Portrait in Ideas." His atheism is apparent in the revised edition from 1980:  "If there had been a creator, his first act would have been to disappear." ('John Fowles and the Fiction of Freedom' by Lance St John Butler, in The British and Irish Novel Since 1960, edited by James Acheson, 1991, p. 75) In many interviews Fowles expressed his enthusiam for feminist movement and as a result he has attracted the attention of feminist scholars, who have accused  him of failing to reflect the reality of women's lived experience.

For further reading: The Fiction of John Fowles by William J. Palmer (1974); John Fowles: Magus and Moralist by Peter Wolfe (1976); John Fowles by Barry N. Olshen (1978); John Fowles by Robert Huffaker (1980); John Fowles by Peter Conradi (1982); The Fiction of John Fowles by Carol M. Barnum (1988); John Fowles: A Reference Companion by James R. Aubrey (1991); Point of View in Fiction and Film, Focus on John Fowles by Charles Garard (1991); Fiction of John Updike and John Fowles by John Neary (1992); Understanding John Fowles by T.C. Foster (1994); Conversations with John Fowles, ed. by Dianne L. Vipond (1999); The Poetics of Mystery: Genre, Representation, and Narrative Ethics in John Fowles's Historical Fiction by Klaus Brax (2003); John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds by Eileen Warburton (2004); John Fowles: Visionary and Voyeur by Brooke Lenz (2008); John Fowles, edited by James Acheson (2013); Filming John Fowles: Critical Essays on Motion Picture and Television Adaptations, edited by James Aubrey (2015); 'Neo-Victorian Novels: Staging Historicity in John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman' by Claudia Olk, in The Return of the Historical Novel?: Thinking about Fiction and History After Historiographic Metafiction, edited by Andrew James Johnston & Kai Wiegandt (2017); The Faustus Myth in the English Novel by Șeyda Sivrioğlu (2017); 'The 1960s Existential Fiction of John Fowles' by Michelle Phillips Buchberger, in The 1960s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction, edited by Philip Tew, James Riley and Melanie Seddon (2018); Politics and the British Novel in the 1970s by J. Russell Perkin (2021)

Selected works:

• The Collector, 1963
  - Neitoperho (suom. Seere Salminen, 1964)
  - films: The Collector (1965), prod. Collector Company, Columbia Pictures Corporation, dir. by William Wyler,screenplay John Kohn, Stanley Mann, starring Terence Stamp and Samatha Eggar; Bilanggo sa dilim (1986), prod. Solid Video, dir. Mike De Leon, starring Joel Torre, Cherie Gil, Rio Locsin 
• The Aristos: A Self.Portrait and Ideas, 1964
  - Aristos: käsityksiäni elämästä (suom. Tuija Rovamo, 1985)
• The Magus, 1965 (rev. ed. 1977)
  - Jumalten naamiot (suom. Erkki Haglund, 1986)
• The Magus, 1968 (screenplay)
  - film: The Magus (1968), prod. Blazer, dir. by Guy Green, starring Michael Caine, Anthony Quinn, Candice Bergen, Anna Karina. "This near-miss is not without many notable virtues. Fowles's script sustains interest in its convolutions, direction is resourceful and sensitive, Caine is far more dynamic than usual and Quinn and the two femme stars register strongly." (from Variety Movie Guide 2000, ed. by Derek Elley, 2000)
• The French Lieutenant's Woman, 1969
  - Ranskalaisen luutnantin nainen (suom. Kaarina Jaatinen, Hannu Sarrala, 1973)
  - film: The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), prod. Juniper Films, dir. by Karel Reisz from a screenplay by Harold Pinter, starring Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons. "The film's frequent mirror shots are not only a reference to the illusions of the Victorian age, or the way Victorian fiction is mirrored by events in the modern story. They also relate to Sarah Woodruff as conscious performer, a woman of imagination with a flair for lurid self-dramatization." (from Neil Sinyard's essay, quoted in The Meryl Streep Story by Nick Smurthwaite, 1984)
• Poems, 1973
• Shipwreck, 1974 (photographs by the Gibsons of Scilly)
• The Ebony Tower, 1974
  - Eebenpuutorni (suom. Heimo Pihlajamaa, 1975)
  - TV film: The Ebony Tower (1984), prod. Granada Television, dir. by Robert Knights, teleplay John Mortimer, starring Laurence Olivier, Roger Rees, Greta Scacchi
• Cinderella, 1974 (adapted from Perrault’s Cendrillon of 1697 by John Fowles; illustrated by Sheilah Beckett)
• Daniel Martin, 1977
• Ourika / Claire de Durfort, 1977 (translated into English with an introd. and epilogue by John Fowles)
• Steep Holm, 1978 (editor)
• Conditional, 1979
• Islands, 1979 (photographs by Fay Godwin)
• The Tree, 1979 (photographs by Frank Horvat)
• The Enigma of Stonehenge, 1980 (photographs by Barry Brukoff)
• Don Juan, 1981 (adaptation of the play by Molière)
• A Brief History of Lyme, 1981
• Monumenta Britannica by John Aubrey, 1981-82 (ed., with Rodney Legg)
• Mantissa, 1982
• A Short History of Lyme Regis, 1982
• Lorenzaccio, 1983 (adaptation of the play by Alfred de Musset)
• Thomas Hardy's England / Jo Draper, 1984 (introduced and edited by John Fowles)
• A Maggot, 1985
  - Ilmestys (suom. Klaus Karttunen, 1987)
• Land / Fay Godwin, 1985 (with an essay by John Fowles;  introduction by Ian Jeffrey)
• Martine, 1985 (adaptation of a play by Jean Jacques Bernard)
• Lyme Regis Camera, 1991
• Tessera, 1993
• The Tree; The Nature of Nature, 1995 (two essays accompanied by eight woodcuts by Aaron Johnson and published by Carolyn and James Robertson) 
  
• Wormholes: Essays and Occasional Writings, 1998 (edited and introduced by Jan Relf)
• John Fowles and Nature, 1999 (edited by James R. Aubrey)
• Conversations with John Fowles, 1999 (edited by Dianne L. Vipond)
• The Journals. Volume I, 2003 (edited and with an introduction by Charles Drazin)
• The Journals. Volume II, 2005 (edited and with an introduction by Charles Drazin)
• Selected Poems, 2012 (edited with an introduction by Adam Thorpe)