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“It started four or five months ago as a visual image. A woman stands at the end of a deserted quay and stares out to sea. That was all. This image rose in my mind one morning when I was still in bed half asleep … I ignored this image; but it recurred … The woman obstinately refused to stare out of the window of an airport lounge; it had to be this ancient quay … An outcast. I didn't know her crime, but I wished to protect her. That is, I began to fall in love with her … This— not literally—pregnant female image came at a time … when I was already halfway through another novel … It was an interference, but of such power that it soon came to make the previously planned work seem the intrusive element of my life … Once the seed germinates, reason and knowledge, culture and the rest have to start to grow it …”
Thus wrote John Fowles in his “Notes on Writing a Novel,” the novel being “The French Lieutenant's Woman.” The first sentence of the book sets the time and place: late March 1867, on pier jutting out into Lyme Bay, “that largest bite from the underside of England's out-stretched southwestern leg …” It also sets the angle and object of our interest: “a local spy” might focus his telescope on a couple strolling towards a black figure of a woman who is leaning against an upended cannon barrel at the end of an ancient quay, facing the sea. She is the woman called “whore” (by some), who had been abandoned by the French Lieutenant. “There is a child?” “No. I think no child …”
The author's imagination has taken the image which seized him in half-sleep and has projected her a century back in time, staring out to sea from the underbelly of England's southwestern shore, having been abandoned, not literally pregnant, by her foreign lover. She, the upended cannon, and the sea