I finally read the last of my 2023 Christmas books at the end of August, The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles, on a trip to Lyme Regis where it is set. It was recommended to me as a great example of an intrusive omnipresent narrator, a style that has definitely fallen out of fashion since Victorian times, with the growth of first person and close third narratives.

This is a Victorian novel with a difference – it’s written in the 1960s, and proud of the fact, peppered as it is with modern comparisons and references, observing the protagonists from more than a century’s distance.

Sarah Woodruff is the woman of the title, a disgraced resident of Lyme Regis who has the temerity to walk the undercliff path, despite its reputation as destination for illicit liaisons. Having walked all three hours of it myself, it is certainly not a place to feel comfortable in, particularly if you are a woman alone. Here she bumps into Charles Smithson, out fossil hunting but secretly hoping to come across the woman who has haunted him (when he should have been thinking about his fiancé) since seeing her standing on the Cobb staring out to sea waiting for her lost lover. Their lives become intertwined as Charles wrestles with his conscious, duties and his promises, against his overwhelming desire for Sarah. 

The narrator boldly offers us two paths as the novel draws to a close – Charles doing the right thing and Charles following his heart’s desire, and when the novel finally reaches its conclusion there are again two alternatives available. I chose to take the first.