1969 John Fowles’s novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman was published on 12 June of this year by Jonathan Cape. Fowles had not yet made his name and had a lot riding on the work. He was buoyed up, however, by the confidence that his charismatic editor at Cape, Tom Maschler, had in the work. ‘Magnificent’ was Maschler’s telegraphed verdict on reading the manuscript.
The British reviewers were less enthused. The Times was curtly negative. The Guardian reviewer objected that ‘symbols and allegory stain every page of this long, puzzling book’. Fowles found the pervasive lack of sympathy with the new things that he was trying to do in the novel ‘mean’.
As his biographer Eileen Warburton records:
Fowles drifted in a blue mood for weeks after the publication of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, complaining of malaise, aches and pains, nicotine addiction, and morbid apathy … He had a persistent sense of failure. He began, on June 27, 1969 a novel with the working title Futility.
It would never see the light of print. The autumn publication of the novel in the USA by Little, Brown was an unqualified triumph. Fowles was, to his astonishment, described as ‘the most brilliant of stars, better than Bellow, Roth, and Updike’. On an author’s tour in the US, he discovered, on campus visits, that his book was wildly popular: it had replaced Lord of the Flies and The Catcher in the Rye (novels of the 1950s) as the novel of the sixties. Along with The French Lieutenant’s Woman, his earlier novel The Magus (universally scorned by British reviewers) achieved cult status.
No longer haunted by a sense of futility, the jubilant Fowles even contrived to give up smoking.