John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds

Contemporary Review, Nov, 2004

John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds. Eileen Warburton. Jonathan Cape. [pounds sterling]25.00. xvii 510. ISBN 0-224-05951-3. John Fowles's fame as a writer is largely based on his novels, The Collector and The French Lieutenant's Woman, but of the man himself little is known: he carefully avoids the 'literary world' of London.

This biography concentrates on what Mr Fowles himself called the ethnology of the novelist, the study of living behaviour in the artist. The writer had full access to Mr Fowles' diaries before they were published and also to his letters and those of his first wife. There were also numerous interviews with the novelist and his associates stretching over many years. Writing biographies of living people is always dangerous, especially when they are novelists used to creating rather than chronicling events. Mrs Warburton is respectful of the 'great novelist' and writes with sympathy, but she is not uncritical and has given us a well rounded study of a writer and his world. (G.R.W.)