Daniel Martin is a love story that might take place anywhere: indeed, it mostly takes place in circumstances which liberate hero and heroine from any involvement in society, politics, or ideology, on a trip to Egypt, the Nile, Abu Simbel, Palmyra, Lebanon. The relation between social structure and individual feeling is a major theme in itself, but it does not exert any pressure upon Daniel Martin. Fowles evidently wanted to exhibit the mutual bearing of society and individual, but the design does not go any further than the device of making Dan an English writer temporarily doctoring scripts in Hollywood….

Fowles's native theme is more accurately indicated in the epigraph to The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969), a sentence from Zur Judenfrage in which Marx says that "every emancipation is a restoration of the human world and of human relationships to man himself." Much of the significance of The French...