The French Lieutenant's Woman

John Fowles Biography

John Fowles was born in 1926 in Bedford, England. After graduation from Oxford University, where he studied French, he taught in France and also for several years on a Greek island, then returned to England and worked on his first novel, The Collector, published in 1963. After its publication, and the good reviews which it received, he gave up teaching to pursue writing full time.

Fowles' next work was The Aristos, a collection of philosophical aphorisms, published in 1965. The Magus, his next novel, was published in 1966, and in 1978, he published a revision of it. The French Lieutenant's Woman appeared in 1969. The Ebony Tower, a collection of short stories, was published in 1974. His later novels include Daniel Martin (1978), Mantissa (1982), and A Maggot (1985). John Fowles died in 2005.