FRENCH LIEUTENANTS WOMAN (PB)

From the god-like stance of the nineteenth-century novelist, which John Fowles both assumes and gently mocks, to the last detail of dress, idiom and manners, The French Lieutenant's Woman is an immaculate recreation of Victorian England. Not only is it the epic love story of two people seeking escape from the cant and hypocrisy of their age, it is also a brilliantly sustained allegory of the decline of the twentieth-century passion for freedom.