“He did say that he would not let his daughter marry a man who considered his grandfather to be an ape.” - Charles, p. 7 “Then how, dear girl, are we ever to be glued together in holy matrimony?” - Charles, p. 7

There [in Paris] his tarnished virginity was soon blackened out of recognition... Page 14

Perhaps an emotion not absolutely unconnected with malice, a product of so many long hours of hypocrisy – or at least a not always complete frankness – at Mrs. Poulteney’s bombazined side, at any rate an impulse made him turn and go back to her drawing room. Page 24

This tension, then – between lust and renunciation, undying recollection and undying repression, lyrical surrender and tragic duty, between the sorted facts and their noble use – energizes and explains one of the age’s greatest writers; and beyond him, structures the whole age itself. It is this I have digressed to remind you of. Page 272

Are not all declared lovers the world’s fool? Page 26

He would have mad eyou smile, for he was carefully equipped for his role…Where one wonders, can any of the pleasure been left? How, in the case of Charles, can he not have seen that light clothes would have been more comfortable? That a hat was not necessary? That stout nailed boots on a boulder strewn beach are a suitable as ice skates? Page 46-47

“She has taken to walking, ma’m, on Ware Commons.” Page 64-65

It was this place, an English Garden of Edenn on such a day as March 29 th, 1867, that Charles had entered when he climbed the path from the shore at Pinhay Pay; and it was this same place whose eastern half called Ware Commons. Page 67

Hers was certainly a very beautiful voice, controlled and clear, though always shaded with sorrow and often intense in feeling; but above all, it was a sincere voice. Page 57

He began to compose a special prayer for his circumstances: “Forgive me, O Lord, for my selfishness. Forgive me…” Page 358

"Fowles is 'giving us a taste of old-fashioned assurances... in order to brace us for the harsh and lonely realities of the second [ending].'" Wendy Perkins

"The contradictions in the novels represent those within a whole generation trying to make the difficult leap into a more modern self and world." Contemporary Literary Criticism vol. 15

John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman has been read, with reason, as a testament to existentialism: Sarah functions as the moral impetus that propels Charles into an existential freedom. Eva Mokry Pohler

The French Lieutenant's Woman is probably the best of Fowles's works to examine closely on this subject, but it presents some difficulties, situated as it is on the edge of his change in thinking, perhaps about existentialism and certainly about the novel itself. Richard P. Lynch

Given the ostensibly postmodern status of two of these works, The French Lieutenant's Woman and Possession, one might have guessed at a more skeptical approach to this old story. Jonathan Loesberg