The Journals: Volume 2: 1966-1990

John Fowles gained international recognition in 1963 with his first published novel, The Collector, but his labor on what may be his greatest literary undertaking, his journals, commenced over a decade earlier. Fowles, whose works include The Maggot, The French Lieutenant's Woman, and The Ebony Tower, is among the most inventive and influential English novelists of the twentieth century.

The first volume begins in 1949 with Fowles' final year at Oxford. It reveals his intellectual maturation, chronicling his experiences as a university lecturer in France and as a schoolteacher on the Greek island of Spetsai. Simultaneously candid and eloquent, Fowles' journals also expose the deep connection between his personal and scholarly lives as Fowles struggled to win literary acclaim. From his affair with Elizabeth, the married woman who would become his first wife, to his passion for film, ornithology, travel, and book collecting, the journals present a portrait of a man eager to experience life.

The second and final volume opens in 1966, as Fowles, already an international success, navigates his newfound fame and wealth. With absolute honesty, his journals map his inner turmoil over his growing celebrity and his hesitance to take on the role of a public figure. Fowles recounts his move from London to a secluded house on England's Dorset coast, where discontented with society's voracious materialism he led an increasingly isolated life.

Great works in their own right, Fowles' journals elucidate the private thoughts that gave rise to some of the greatest writing of our time.

The second and concluding volume of John Fowles’s eloquent, revelatory journals, the first of which was widely greeted as a literary landmark (“The book is gripping, and one can’t help feeling that Fowles was writing—with a dogged passion, and almost inadvertently—what may come to be seen as one of the very best of his works” —Literary Review). Commencing in 1966, after the author had already achieved international renown with the publications of The Collector and The Magus, these journals chart the rewards and struggles of Fowles’s continuing career and the inner life of the often-reluctant celebrity.

Bravely forthright and honest, Fowles writes in his journals about the attention and wealth that accrued to him with each new book—among them The French Lieutenant’s Woman in 1969 (a film version of which was released to international acclaim in 1981), The Ebony Tower in 1974, Daniel Martin in 1977, A Maggot in 1985—and about his deep ambivalence toward his growing fame. He chronicles his move from London to a remote house on England’s Dorset coast near the town of Lyme Regis, the increasingly isolated life he cultivated there, his disenchantment with what he saw as an unrelenting materialism at the center of contemporary society, and his unwillingness to adopt a public persona for his readers and fans. He describes the strains that grew between him and his wife, Elizabeth, and tells about the challenges—illness, depression, loss—of the passing years. But he describes, as well, the pleasure he found in his ten-year post as curator of the small Lyme Regis historical museum, and the great solace he took in gardening, in books, and in his impassioned study of the flora, fauna, and fossils of the countryside around his home.

Fiercely candid, and as ardent, gripping, and beautifully written as his novels, Fowles’s journals illuminate the complex life and mind of one of the most important writers of our time.

The New York Times - James Campbell

The deepest impression left by The Journals is of how enervating it must have been to be John Fowles. In the stable in his garden, he has a sensation of being haunted by his own ghost: Being dead while I am still alive. Admirers who write letters are like leeches. Society is suffering from a sickness, of which the popularity of Harold Robbins ( a reptile ) is a symptom. When Fowles and his wife, Elizabeth, fly to New York in November 1969 for the publication of The French Lieutenant s Woman, at the peak of his success, they sit around in the hotel for hours, unable to face going out. To face New York. It s partly the wretched central heating, the abominable lassitude it induces. Only Fowles could number central heating among the perils of fame and fortune.

John Fowles was born in 1926 and died in November of 2005.

Charles Drazin is an editor and writer whose previous books include In Search of the Third Man and Korda: Britain’s Only Movie Mogul.