In The French Lieutenant's Woman, itself a species of historical romance, albeit an ornately mannered and self-conscious one, [John] Fowles addresses the problem of repression and liberation as aspects both of the evolution of modern ethics, so that its major characters defy social convention, and also of the emancipation of the poetics of his chosen fictional form, so that the revelation and denunciation of the inauthenticities of his hero are accompanied by the attempt to expose the conventions and hypocrisies of the form. The 'liberation' of both novel-characters and readers is the apparent aim, albeit one that can never be achieved. The book may award us three endings: life, as Christopher Ricks pointed out, would give us an infinity. The particular three that we are given, moreover, are naturally not innocent. The narrative presence which is responsible for these manipulations, is in a real sense the book's true...