The plot explores the fraught relationship of gentleman and amateur naturalist Charles Smithson and Sarah Woodruff, the former governess and independent woman with whom he falls in love.

[5] Part of the novel's reputation concerns its postmodern literary qualities, with expressions of metafiction, historiography, metahistory, Marxist criticism, and feminism.

The novel was adapted into a film in 1981, with script by the playwright Harold Pinter, directed by Karel Reisz, starring Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons.

[10] Throughout the essay, Fowles describes multiple influences and issues important to the novel's development, including his debt to other authors such as Thomas Hardy.

[2] Set in the mid-nineteenth century, the narrator identifies the novel's protagonist as Sarah Woodruff, the Woman of the title, also known as "Tragedy" and as "The French Lieutenant's Whore".

She lives in the coastal town of Lyme Regis as a disgraced woman, supposedly abandoned by a French ship's officer named Varguennes who had returned to France and married.

One day, Charles Smithson, an orphaned gentleman, and Ernestina Freeman, his fiancée and a daughter of a wealthy tradesman, see Sarah walking along the cliffside.

They are as follows: Like many other postmodern novels, Fowles uses multiple different stylistic and structural techniques to highlight his thematic interests in The French Lieutenant's Woman.

[21] Instead of nicely complementing the main plot and adding meaning, these paratextual elements can distract from the effectiveness of the novel and challenge the authority of the narrative voice.

[22] Linda Hutcheon describes the works of William Thackeray, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Froude, and Thomas Hardy as direct inspirations for this parody.

The novel's narrator demonstrates and proclaims a feminist approach to women:[29] Sarah is presented as a more liberated and independently willed woman as compared to the other model female characters, such as Ernestina and her aunt.

[29] Alice Ferrebe also notes that, despite Fowles's attempts to critique masculine values, his novels remain male fantasies demonstrative of the "compromises and contradictions" created by the gendered situation in which he was writing.

[31] Other literary critics, such as William Palmer, Peter Conradi, Bruce Woodcock and Pamela Cooper, have also critiqued Fowles's claims to a feminist perspective and representation.

Through Sarah's deliberate spreading of lies about herself and her relationship with Charles, Fowles brilliantly brings about the various aspects of femininity that has the potential to authenticate, threaten, and expose the vanity of the male subjects.

[32] In her important study of postmodernity and its poetics in literature, Linda Hucheon describes this novel as definitive of a genre she calls "historiographic metafiction".

She defines this postmodern genre as "well-known and popular novels which are both intensely self-reflexive yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages.

[6] Important to her discussion of the genre's post-modern style, The French Lieutenant's Woman's self-reflexive narration bridges different discourses that usually remain separated, such as academic history, literary criticism, philosophy and literature.

For example, in her queer studies-based article, "Historical Romance, Gender and Heterosexuality", Lisa Fletcher argues that The French Lieutenant's Woman, by relying on a "good love story" as the central means of representing the past, projects a contemporary hetero-normative sexuality on the history of Victorian England.

"[36] Glendening says that Fowles uses commentary on Darwinism "to comment on characters and their experience and to forward a view of natural and human reality opposed to Christian doctrine, and, within limits amenable to existentialist philosophy.

"[37] In general, Glendening sees ideas of science and religion as central to the personal and social identities that develop within the novel, but creating symbolically conflictual binaries.

He suggests that Fowles manoeuvres these conflictual forces to favour an existential self-revelation exhibited through the main character of Smithson, leading to a conclusion that "the freedom implicit in accepting alienation should be exercised in overcoming it.

"[40] In March 1970, the magazine American Libraries named the novel as one of the "Notable Books of 1969," calling it "A successful blending of two worlds as the author writes in modern terminology of the Victorian era.

"[41] The novel has been reprinted in numerous editions and translated into many languages: Taiwanese, Danish, Dutch, Arabic, Finnish, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Chinese, German, Russian, Polish, and Spanish.

In 'Possession' I used this kind of narrator deliberately three times in the historical narrative—always to tell what the historians and biographers of my fiction never discovered, always to heighten the reader's imaginative entry into the world of the text.