From Publishers Weekly
Granted full access by the reclusive author to his voluminous journals and personal papers, Warburton's first book is a sweeping, all-but-authorized biography that will surprise fans of The Magus with its account of Fowles's conventional background and entice those of The French Lieutenant's Woman with its intimate portrait of his marriage. Born into a thoroughly bourgeois English family in 1926, Fowles grew up in suburban Essex, was head boy at a prestigious public school, dutifully trained in the Marines during WWII and studied French at Oxford. Only when he went abroad did he begin to set himself apart and pursue writing. While teaching on the Greek isle of Spetsai, Fowles fatefully got involved with a colleague's wife, Elizabeth Christy, in a passionate affair that, Warburton cogently argues, was the central event of his emotional and creative life. Eventually Elizabeth obtained a divorce, and their subsequent marriage encompassed Fowles's novelistic career. Although Elizabeth destroyed most of her own papers in 1982, Warburton convincingly conveys her central role as not only Fowles's inspiration for his strong female characters but also his best reader and critic. Elizabeth often rankled at being an author's wife after the bestselling The Collector, but her critical involvement in The French Lieutenant's Woman proved essential. Fowles stopped seeking out her opinion on later books, but the two otherwise lived happily enough in Dorset. Elizabeth's death in 1990 compounded a stroke Fowles suffered earlier and closed one chapter on his creative life. Although the novelist's journals have not yet been published here in America, Warburton's thorough treatment of his multifaceted life will hold its own when they are. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
"Perhaps it is that I am hunting the woman archetype," the novelist John Fowles wrote in his diary in 1954, several years before he began work on The Collector, the book that brought him worldwide fame when it was published 41 years ago. Indeed, John Fowles's entire career seems aimed at giving chase to this elusive figure, as he did in his other best-known novels (The Magus and The French Lieutenant's Woman), his later works (Daniel Martin, Mantissa, A Maggot) and the stories collected in The Ebony Tower. Fowles himself has remained even more difficult to pin down. Now Eileen Warburton has brought him to ground in her exhilarating, exhaustive and entertaining biography John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds.Reams of criticism and a library's worth of doctoral dissertations have been devoted to Fowles's oeuvre, but Warburton's biography is the first, and it was written with Fowles's full cooperation. "There's only one way that you could do it," he told her. "Tell the truth. Tell the truth."To that end, he gave Warburton access to all of his papers, published and unpublished; cleared the way for interviews with friends, family members and colleagues, and allowed her to read the surviving letters of his great muse, his late wife Elizabeth.Warburton has in particular drawn heavily from Fowles's journals -- Volume 1 (which I have read in the UK edition) will be published in a revised edition in the United States later this year. The resulting portrait is not necessarily a pretty one, but the narrative Warburton makes of this prickly author's life is riveting and, in its final depiction of a literary lion in winter -- the 78-year-old Fowles continues to live in Lyme Regis, the setting for The French Lieutenant's Woman -- very moving.Fowles was born in 1926, to middle-class parents. A fine athlete and a good student, the reserved young man was most absorbed by long solitary rambles in the countryside, recording what he saw in a series of journals. According to Warburton, "He began to feel that he had a special 'touch' with wild things. 'The secret [Fowles wrote] is . . . the cultivation of an intuitive sense. . . . Not just at odd times, but always.' He returned over and over to the same places, exulting in 'the pleasure of knowing a place intimately,' and listed, among other pleasures and details, 'the places to hide.' " This "nearly mystical identification" with the natural world grew over time into his fictional obsession with what Warburton describes as "an inexplicable conversion experience, a moment of transformation and emotional comprehension of the possibilities of all life. Some sort of similar mystical, deeply irrational, highly personal confrontation with the mystery of the universe became an experience common to many of Fowles's protagonists." Yet even while Fowles was observing wood pigeons and chipping sparrows, the moths and dragonflies he so loved, he was also hunting them: putting butterflies in a killing jar with cyanide, holding a wounded curlew under a stream to "dispassionately" watch it drown. In light of Fowles's later writerly concerns, this seems less the hunter's detached cruelty than an eerie distillation of one artist's creative process: the ceaseless effort to capture a moment of transcendence, or the being who embodies its mystery, then to relentlessly observe and absorb it and finally transform it into fiction.In 1944, at 18, Fowles left school for an officers' training program, finishing his training just weeks after the war in Europe ended. In 1947, after debating whether to pursue a regular officer's commission or a university degree, he chose the latter. At Oxford he read Modern Languages, specializing in French. As an undergrad, he enjoyed several rapturous sojourns in France, falling in love with various women as well as with the French existentialists whose works were to inform so much of his own writing.After receiving his degree, in 1950 he took a position at the University of Poitiers. He seems to have been a lackluster teacher, but he wrote furiously -- plays, filmscripts, short stories, dozens of poems, in addition to the voluminous journals (he calls them "disjoints") he kept for most of his life. He was not asked to return to the University after the spring term, but by the end of 1951 he was already on his way to a new position, as English master at a boys' school on the island of Spetsai, Greece.At this point real life begins to dovetail with fiction, specifically the imaginary Greek island of The Magus, where the callow young Nicholas Urfe meets a Prospero-like figure whose complex "godgames" interweave strands of Mythos and Eros involving Nicholas's various romantic entanglements. Fowles was enchanted by Spetsai's natural history and its inhabitants. And in 1953 he met its Circe -- Elizabeth Christy (née Betty Whitton), the 28-year-old wife of Roy Christy, a published writer who arrived on Spetsai to take a position at the same school where Fowles taught. The three almost immediately fell into a pattern of drinking and traveling together, with Fowles usually picking up the tab for the impecunious Roy, a feckless husband and alcoholic. Within a few months, Fowles and Elizabeth were involved in a passionate relationship that scandalized the islanders, even as Elizabeth galvanized Fowles's imagination. She became his once and future muse, and would continue to be so until her death, 37 years later. He did not so much write about her, as through her: She was the prism that refracted his longings for transcendence, the erotic and transformative mystery that was at the center of his work. She was also often his best reader and editor -- it was Elizabeth who pointed out the weaknesses in the original final chapter of The French Lieutenant's Woman, and her insight seems to have inspired the now-famous double endings to that novel. Warburton's account of the couple's early years together itself reads like a novel -- the loss of the island paradise followed by Dickensian poverty in gray London, the years of waiting for the Christys' divorce to become final. Most heartbreaking is the sad figure of Elizabeth's tiny daughter, Anna, whom Fowles referred to as "it," "an abstract something to be pushed aside." Shuttled among her parents, grandparents, various convent schools and caregivers, the child was a haunting presence -- Anna was 9 or 10 before she knew that the pretty lady who visited her was in fact her mother. Elizabeth remained anguished and guilt-ridden until, as years passed, Fowles grudgingly, then with growing affection, welcomed the girl into the household.Somehow, within this romantic and domestic maelstrom, Fowles wrote the bestselling, mostly well-received books that in many ways became templates for so much late-century fiction. The deranged, obsessed narrator of The Collector kidnaps and imprisons a young woman in his basement, prefiguring more serial-killer protagonists than one can count. The interplay of myth, sex, faux-magic and conspiracy in The Magus laid the groundwork for books as varied as Donna Tartt's The Secret History, John Crowley's Aegypt sequence, and Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson's The Illuminatus! Trilogy, among numerous others. The French Lieutenant's Woman, with its twinned endings and sly postmodern take on Victorian sexual mores, begat A.S. Byatt's Possession and launched a thousand graduate careers in English Lit. Mantissa puts us inside a bedridden writer's head, a la Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective, and A Maggot can be read as a subtle first-alien-contact novel, like Karen Joy Fowler's Sarah Canary. Do all of Fowles's books stand the test of time? Probably not, but The Collector and The French Lieutenant's Woman remain enthralling and rewarding even now, and the essays collected in Wormholes are marvelous.Fowles survived his early success. He and Elizabeth moved to the West Country, where he became increasingly involved in preserving Lyme Regis's museum and history, even as Elizabeth fell prey to crippling seasonal depression exacerbated by loneliness and isolation from their London friends. In addition to his fiction, essays and translations of French drama, Fowles wrote a number of unpublished and unpublishable works; it's to Warburton's (and Fowles's) credit that she doesn't whitewash these displays of bad will and bad writing, which include a vituperative and sometimes anti-Semitic rant against the United States, inexplicable in light of Fowles's many Jewish and American friends and colleagues.In 1988, Fowles suffered a stroke. He made a partial recovery but believed it destroyed his ability to write imaginative fiction. Early in 1990 Elizabeth was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Nine days later she was dead.Fowles never wrote another novel. He developed a December-May relationship with an Oxford undergraduate who sounds like a nasty bit of work; but this muse manqué generated no fiction, only 600 pages of obsessive writing in Fowles's journals. In 1998 he married a longtime friend and neighbor, Sarah Smith. The final image in Warburton's book is of Fowles and Anna Christy, Elizabeth's daughter, scattering Elizabeth's ashes over the garden in Lyme Regis, 10 years after her death. It's an elegiac ending to a biography that treats a writer's muse with as much honesty and intelligence as it does the writer himself. Reviewed by Elizabeth HandCopyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
Warburton's voluminous biography offers a textured portrait of a somewhat reserved and nettlesome man. The Fowles that emerges from these pages comes across as an intensely private, contemplative, ambitious, serious, and intermittently likable artist who enjoyed a series of complex relationships with a variety of extraordinary people. Interesting characters inhabit Fowles' life story as surely--and as plentifully--as they do his fiction (including The Magus and The French Lieutenant's Woman). His father, Robert, a thoughtful man who harbored secret literary ambitions of his own, and Elizabeth, his tempestuous wife of many years, are sharply drawn, and these two reveal much about the formative influences in Fowles' life. Warburton's access to Fowles' private diaries has made possible a number of telling insights into the inner workings of a first-rate literary intelligence. Fowles' fierce engagement with the natural world, his almost romantic attachment to "the wild," is also thoroughly explored. For anyone interested in Fowles' work and life, this will surely become the definitive biography. Trygve Thoreson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Book Description
John Fowles has been compared to Henry James and Virginia Woolf. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in The New York Times hailed him as "a remarkable novelist," and the novelist John Gardner described him as "the only writer in English who has the power, range, knowledge, and wisdom of a Tolstoy." Four of his works have been adapted for film, including the Academy Award–nominated The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Despite his immense critical and popular success, only now has Fowles found the capable biographer he has long deserved. In John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds, Eileen Warburton provides a richly detailed portrait that emphasizes his emergence as one the twentieth century’s most important writers. She chronicles his prewar childhood in a London commuter town and in wartime rural England, his Oxford education, and his apprentice years in Europe and London. From a lifetime of intimate correspondence, she narrates Fowles’s thirty-seven-year love affair with the wife who inspired his most memorable women characters. And she follows the astonishing trajectory of Fowles’s long writing career—from his spectacular debut novel, The Collector (1963), to the haunting The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), through his later fiction, poems, essays, and translations.

About the Author
Eileen Warburton is a scholar who lives in Newport, Rhode Island.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Celebrated and applauded as one of the most seductive storytellers of the late twentieth century, a magician of the English language, a pioneer of postmodern sensibility, and the stylistic inspiration for a generation of writers and poets, John Fowles burst from obscurity in 1963 with the spectacular debut of his first novel, The Collector. Over the next two decades, the books rolled out: the astonishing psychological mystifications of The Magus, the haunting Victorian love story of The French Lieutenant's Woman, the pithy existentialist philosophy of The Aristos, the poignant short stories of The Ebony Tower, the transforming memory journey of Daniel Martin, the sizzling parable of Mantissa, the seventeenth-century religious puzzle of A Maggot, and a host of flawless dramatic translations and penetrating essays. The appearance of each of Fowles's romantic and fiercely intellectual works became a major literary event.

Yet John Fowles himself remained as much a mystery as the twists and turns of his most famous novels. Charming and urbane but increasingly reclusive, he shunned the trappings of the celebrity world to withdraw into the solitude of a remote seaside home and the complex richness of his own imagination. Beyond his need for personal privacy, the secret he guarded was the extent to which his fiction was the mythologized tale of his own inward and outward life.

This story of Fowles's life and its reflection in his work is told for the first time in this groundbreaking biography. Drawing on unprecedented access to sixty years of the writer's unedited private diaries; to searching interviews with his family, friends, and associates; to his drafts and unpublished works; to Fowles's intimate personal correspondence and a lifetime's confessional letters by his first wife. Elizabeth, Eileen Warburton provides a richly detailed, authoritative portrait of the troubled and triumphant man who became one of the twentieth century's most important writers.

She chronicles Fowles's prewar childhood in a London commuter suburb and in wartime rural England, his Oxford education, his self-inventing wanderings through France and Greece, and his ambitious, impoverished apprentice years in London. She follows the powerful trajectory of Fowles's long writing career, even as the famous artist evaded exposure and created escapes through his unpublished writings and retreats into the wild natural world. From his wife's letters and often in Elizabeth Fowles's own words, Warburton also presents with compelling sympathy Fowles's tumultuous thirty-seven-year love affair with the beloved woman who edited his work, connected him to other people, and inspired his most memorable female characters.

Brilliantly researched and written with a narrative immediacy worthy of its novelist subject, John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds brings Fowles's many readers a long-overdue perspective on the life of this enduring storyteller.

FROM THE CRITICS

The New York Times

A degree of Fowlesian lushness spills into Warburton's writing. She is by no means uncritical of her subject, either as a man or a writer, but her stance is one of sympathetic intimacy. On the whole this is no drawback; she is careful not to overindulge it. — Richard Eder

The Washington Post

"Perhaps it is that I am hunting the woman archetype," the novelist John Fowles wrote in his diary in 1954, several years before he began work on The Collector, the book that brought him worldwide fame when it was published 41 years ago. Indeed, John Fowles's entire career seems aimed at giving chase to this elusive figure, as he did in his other best-known novels (The Magus and The French Lieutenant's Woman), his later works (Daniel Martin, Mantissa, A Maggot) and the stories collected in The Ebony Tower. Fowles himself has remained even more difficult to pin down. Now Eileen Warburton has brought him to ground in her exhilarating, exhaustive and entertaining biography John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds. — Elizabeth Hand

Publishers Weekly

Granted full access by the reclusive author to his voluminous journals and personal papers, Warburton's first book is a sweeping, all-but-authorized biography that will surprise fans of The Magus with its account of Fowles's conventional background and entice those of The French Lieutenant's Woman with its intimate portrait of his marriage. Born into a thoroughly bourgeois English family in 1926, Fowles grew up in suburban Essex, was head boy at a prestigious public school, dutifully trained in the Marines during WWII and studied French at Oxford. Only when he went abroad did he begin to set himself apart and pursue writing. While teaching on the Greek isle of Spetsai, Fowles fatefully got involved with a colleague's wife, Elizabeth Christy, in a passionate affair that, Warburton cogently argues, was the central event of his emotional and creative life. Eventually Elizabeth obtained a divorce, and their subsequent marriage encompassed Fowles's novelistic career. Although Elizabeth destroyed most of her own papers in 1982, Warburton convincingly conveys her central role as not only Fowles's inspiration for his strong female characters but also his best reader and critic. Elizabeth often rankled at being an author's wife after the bestselling The Collector, but her critical involvement in The French Lieutenant's Woman proved essential. Fowles stopped seeking out her opinion on later books, but the two otherwise lived happily enough in Dorset. Elizabeth's death in 1990 compounded a stroke Fowles suffered earlier and closed one chapter on his creative life. Although the novelist's journals have not yet been published here in America, Warburton's thorough treatment of his multifaceted life will hold its own when they are. Agent, Melanie Jackson. (Mar. 22) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews