John Fowles (1926-2005) was a novelist. William Stephenson's 2003 critical study divides Fowles's work into three chronological phases, focusing on his development as a novelist, essayist, and thinker; discussing him in the light of his literary predecessors such as Hardy, Defoe, and Scott; and examining the key biographical influences on his writing. This book breaks new ground by exploring the hitherto overlooked role of ethnicity in Fowles's novels, and his idiosyncratic treatment of the past in The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969) and A Maggot (1985).