Excerpt from The French Lieutenant’s Woman

publish Opened 2024-06-10, but I originally bookmarked this for myself on 2017-06-11. It’s actually at Dad’s recommendation, I think. From Poetry and literature I like.

(Excerpt from “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”, published in England in 1969)

But this is preposterous? A character is either “real” or “imaginary”? If you think that, hypocrite lecteur, I can only smile. You do not even think of your own past as quite real; you dress it up, you gild it or blacken it, censor it, tinker with it … fictionalize it, in a word, and put it away on a shelf—your book, your romanced autobiography. We are all in flight from the real reality. That is a basic definition of Homo sapiens.

So if you think all this unlucky (but it is Chapter Thirteen) digression has nothing to do with your Time, Progress, Society, Evolution and all those other capitalized ghosts in the night that are rattling their chains behind the scenes of this book … I will not argue. But I shall suspect you.

— John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, 1969