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No current examination of John Fowles' novel, The French Lieutenant's Woman, can fail to take account of the film version of it made in 1981, because the child in so many ways is so unlike its parent. When Harold Pinter and Karel Reisz went to work on the film adaptation, Fowles made only one request: “‘Go off and do what you like … just don't explain Sarah.’”1 What came of their efforts honors that injunction. Pinter's screenplay incorporates the main body of Fowles' plot but preserves its mystery by eliminating or reordering significant events, and by adding a parallel plot that is entirely new.2 Under Reisz's able direction, Pinter's text takes visual form, and The French Lieutenant's Woman as film achieves an integrity all its own.
It is interesting to note the importance Fowles attached to Sarah's mystery. Twelve years after the novel's publication, he still felt a strong urge to protect the secret sources of her behavior from casual exposure. Sarah is both a symbol of an aspect of the unconscious and herself a guardian of its mysteries. One cannot understand her behavior without also understanding Charles': keeping her secrets therefore protects his. She is the key to the novel, while he is its protagonist, and she guards its heart's truth.3 Fowles constructed