Rating: 
Summary: Great novel- sorry, I may have some spoilers here.......
Review: This is a wonderfully complex, mysterious, stunningly wrought work. Fowles succeeds in injecting his postmodern, often comical viewpoints into this "Victorian" novel. Example: I love how the narrator steps into the train compartment and sits across from Charles, contemplating his future and what he has in store for him. That is damned neat! Even more fascinating is that this narrator, god, whatever you would prefer to call him, describes himself as having a huge beard, and Fowles (if you've seen any pictures of him) has a big white beard as well. I digress...The prose is excellent. The novel remains quite accessible and engrossing while still tackling complex ideas. I loved the exisentialism ideas swirling around the novel, and in Charles and Sarah, Fowles has created two unforgettable characters "seeking to escape the tryanny and cant of their age," as it is stated on the cover of my book. This novel captures the essence of the Victorian period as well as Dickens or Eliot would, but the difference is that Fowles skillfully penetrates through the hypocrisy and artificiality of the time with his sharp observations. Ever the postmodernist, Fowles provides us with both a Victorian ending (perhaps as Dickens would have liked it; it is practically overflowing with sentimentality) and a Modern ending. A must read!
Rating:
Summary: Great novel- sorry, I may have some spoilers here.......
Review: This is a wonderfully complex, mysterious, stunningly wrought work. Fowles succeeds in injecting his postmodern, often comical viewpoints into this "Victorian" novel. Example: I love how the narrator steps into the train compartment and sits across from Charles, contemplating his future and what he has in store for him. That is damned neat! Even more fascinating is that this narrator, god, whatever you would prefer to call him, describes himself as having a huge beard, and Fowles (if you've seen any pictures of him) has a big white beard as well. I digress...The prose is excellent. The novel remains quite accessible and engrossing while still tackling complex ideas. I loved the exisentialism ideas swirling around the novel, and in Charles and Sarah, Fowles has created two unforgettable characters "seeking to escape the tryanny and cant of their age," as it is stated on the cover of my book. This novel captures the essence of the Victorian period as well as Dickens or Eliot would, but the difference is that Fowles skillfully penetrates through the hypocrisy and artificiality of the time with his sharp observations. Ever the postmodernist, Fowles provides us with both a Victorian ending (perhaps as Dickens would have liked it; it is practically overflowing with sentimentality) and a Modern ending. A must read!
Rating: 
Summary: irritating
Review: This is certainly a parody of victorian pomposity, and made me detest every character Fowles throws at you. The writing style is excessively pompous and hard to follow. There is not one character that you like, or feel for, or care about. If Fowles' aim was to create a cast of characters that bored you to death, he succeeded.
He also must have wanted to make you hate him as well, the way he's so up himself in this book; one chapter is devoted entirely to how brilliant Fowles is at creating people out of words.
The only reason I had for finishing this book was so I could appreciate the film in greater depth, which (somehow) brought a little character to these two-dimensional, cardboard cut-out representations of Victorian literature.
Rating:
Summary: thought provoking
Review: This is great book, and Fowles seems to use this as a mechanism to highight the ironies and contradictions of the society in which we live. The reader is led deceptively to a convincing plot set in Victorian England and is constantly jolted back to reality by Fowles' unexpected and somewhat unconventional interjections. Despite constant reminders (or perhaps because of them) that all the characters are fictional, I feel that each chracter has been well developed and full of life. In the end, the ending does not matter, it is the choices that one makes to get there that does. A remarkable book and an experience to read.
Rating:
Summary: One of the best books of the century.
Review: This is THE book I always recommend. Simply brilliant
Rating:
Summary: amazing literature
Review: This novel is a masterpiece in the craft of writing. Fowles combines science, romance, and literary beauty into one novel. Even if you tend to not choose books this long, you will not regret this book! You won't be able to put it down, the suspense grabs you from the very beginning. He adds quotes from period literatre that helps the reader transport themselves back into the victorian era.
Rating:
Summary: Living in the Moment
Review: This novel is at once a retrospective and a prospective, a narrative that ultimately erases the temporal boundaries between the Victorian era and the modern reader's present moment. Fowles goes considerably beyond a novelist such as A. S. Byatt and even most historians in painting the portrait of an era and its citizens as well as evoking the multifarious "Victorian sensibility," with its ambivalence about social class, morality, progress, science, religion, and, of course, sex. The affair between Charles Smithson, amateur gentleman paleontologist, and Sarah Woodruff, alluring, forbidden "outcast," is, in many respects, no more than a ruse (readers who express disappointment at the ending have no doubt swallowed too much of the bait, reading the novel as conventional romance). The epigraph to the final chapter, Matthew Arnold's "True Piety Is Acting What One Knows," can be taken as a key to the story's compelling theme and purpose. The narrative is a variation on the quest pattern, with the salvation of the story's everyman-protagonist at stake. Moreover, his progress from ignorance to self-knowledge, contrary to Marxist theory and, for that matter, inexorable Darwinian laws of natural selection, requires that he separate himself from his "age," the very culture that has formed him, defined him, and threatens to deform him. The climax in the story is not Charles' meeting with Sarah in the home of the Rossetti's but his epiphany, in Chapter 48, while viewing a Crucifix in the sanctuary of a church. At this moment he sees his preoccupation with fossils as representative of his society's fixation on custom, externals, and respectability at the expense of the interior self and its own priorities. Charles and Sarah find their heart's bliss "through" but certainly not "with" each other. I read this novel at the same time I was reading "The English Patient," Michael Ondaatje's poetic novel that challenges spatial boundaries much as Fowles' narrative does the same with temporal ones. Ondaatje takes fewer chances, constructing a fantastic, impressionistic narrative that makes very few mistakes and admittedly casts a lingering spell. Fowles', on the other hand, risks a lot, especially with his frequent, self-referential intrusions into the narrative--potentially alienating some readers, whether on grounds that he's violated the implict author-reader contract or that he's naively "postmodernist." Regardless, Fowles' novel is the richer, greater achievement, and ultimately the less contrived and pretentious as well. "The French Lieutenant's Woman" is capable of satisfying at many levels. It offers a comprehensive history of the Victorian era, a Dickensian gallery of characters, an dramatization of the faith-doubt struggle found in the poetry of Tennyson and Arnold, a critique of Victorian and modern cultural malaise, a postmodernist literary conceit, an archetypal journey with an existentialist twist. Above all, the attentive reader of this allusive, multi-layered, yet remarkably focused story will be rewarded with a unique understanding of narrative and the reader's place within it. The narrator's offering the reader a choice between two endings has the effect of "liberating" the narrative and relating it to the examined life of the reader's own present. It's difficult to see how a triumph such as this could be excluded from any short list of greatest novels written in English during the second half of the twentieth century.
Rating:
Summary: Unforgettable!
Review: This sounds rather like some kind of pompous acceptance speech, but this book has changed my life, and some kind of thanks are in order to those who led me to it. The book came to me highly recommended by a friend who couldn't stop gushing over it, and who made me feel I was a worthless worm if I hadn't read it yet. And, there was the fact that The French Lt.'s Woman had found its way onto my college syllabus. Which pretty much sealed the issue, and I bought the book. Well, however you may react to The French Lt.'s Woman, it can still only be described as unforgettable. I personally feel it's brilliant: the story, the characters (especially the breezy and curiously likable Charles) and Fowles' wise and witty commentary, which somehow gave the book an almost timeless feel, like it had been set in some indefinite period which could belong anywhere. I know I make it all seem awfully muddled, but the truth is, I'm just plain IN AWE of this magnificent writer. It's been quite a while since I have been so carried away into a different reality by reading a book. I have nothing more to say other than, BUY IT!
Rating:
Summary: The Victorian Era In Retrospect
Review: Though the story in this novel takes place in the Victorian era of England in 1869, it was written a century later, allowing the author and the reader to view the entire time period in retrospect, and make several observations on the age as it pertains to the story he tells. That story involves a young gentleman, Charles, engaged to a suitable young lady, Ernestina, the daughter of a successful tradesman. Charles becomes intrigued by the local outcast Sarah, also known (most euphemistically) as "The French Lieutenant's Woman," and they share an attraction that defies his social station and, as a societal outcast, her lack of one.
Throughout the novel, Fowles inserts information about the era, and highlights in particular the hypocrisy of sexual attitudes and roles. Charles and Sarah find themselves victims of these restrictions, and as such their romance is doomed from the start. Charles convinces himself that he has a truly selfless motive in attempting to help Sarah, whom he sees as a victim, and ends up weaving a web of deceit to himself and others as he fails to see himself falling in love with her. As the novel progresses, one can read in the comments about Victorian standards, commentary about our own modern age. By holding this bygone age up to our own, Fowles shows us how far we've come, and how little we've left behind.
To enhance the immersive storytelling, the prose is written in a style reminiscent of the Victorian authors themselves. In fact, in one section where Fowles points out such contradictions as the fact that in this age when lust was a forbidden topic, one in every sixty houses in London was a brothel, the paragraph might easily be read as "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..." But even in this emulation, he uses more modern literary methods, such as giving a false ending more than a hundred pages before the real end, and inserting himself as a character in the story. These feats are done with expertise and flair, and though they are jarring at first, it quickly becomes apparent that even the tricks are part of the story.
Held up against the story of the upper-class Charles is the subplot of Sam, his manservant. Sam also has his own romance with Mary, a maid in Ernestina's aunt's household. The societal standards for Charles and for Sam are compared and contrasted throughout the book, creating an intriguing duality of storytelling, which leaves the upper-class Victorians looking somewhat the worse for comparison.
If you don't mind a novel that's hard to put down, and very tempting to re-read as soon as you've finished, I strongly recommend The French Lieutenant's Woman.
Rating: 
Summary: worst book classified as "literature" ever
Review: utterly boring. do yourself a favor and read anything else.
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