SOURCE: Dodson, Mary Lynn. “The French Lieutenant's Woman: Pinter and Reisz's Adaptation of John Fowles's Adaptation.” Film/Literature Quarterly 26, no. 4 (1998): 296-302.

In the following essay, Dodson compares the novel The French Lieutenant's Woman, by John Fowles, with its film adaptation, by Pinter. Dodson concludes that Pinter's screenplay is a brilliantly structured, highly faithful adaptation.

Fowles's first novel, The Collector, sold extremely well. With the success of this novel behind him, John Fowles felt secure enough to publish The Aristos, his “self-made opinion on all that concerns us” (8). He admits that this book is offensive in manner because of the “dogmatic way in which [he] set out [his] views on life” (Aristos 7). Fowles defines these views as existential; he perceives the primary concern of existentialism as “preserv[ing] the freedom of the individual against all those pressures-to-conform” (7). Fowles later insisted that his purpose in The Aristos was not in...