Sarah Woodruff Mystique in John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman

Abstract

John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman is a metafictional neo-Victorian novel concerned with a retrospective analysis of Victorian society with the aid of a modern, highly manipulative, narrator. The novel’s protagonist, Sarah Woodruff, is the most enigmatic character due to her manipulative nature and an accomplice narrator who sustains her mystery. This paper analyzes the aura of mystique surrounding Sarah as a revolutionary Victorian and as a narrator-like presence located outside the period to unearth unrepresented tendencies of Victorian society.