The author: Originally an English teacher, John Fowles (b 1926) wrote 10 novels before The Collector (1963) found its way into print. After its success, he moved with his wife, Elizabeth, to Lyme Regis, which became the setting of his third novel, The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969). Its stellar impact - by the time the film came out it had sold 4m copies - turned Fowles into the leading British novelist of his generation. His high profile, however, slowed Fowles's output, and he has written only three full-length novels since: Daniel Martin (1977), Mantissa (1982) and A Maggot (1985). In 1988 he suffered a stroke; two years later he lost his wife.
The story: The French Lieutenant's Woman 's central narrative is the obsessional relationship between Victorian amateur archaeologist Charles Smithson and scandal-dogged governess Sarah Woodruff. But Fowles, evoking the "age of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Roland Barthes", injects a host of postmodern literary devices: annotations, alternative plotlines, authorial digressions, even placing himself in the story. Fowles struck a chord with the gender politics of the late 1960s by fleshing out the invidious position of the Victorian "fallen woman".
The film-maker: Karel Reisz (1926-2002) was born into a Jewish family in what is now the Czech Republic, but came to Britain in 1939 as a 12-year-old after the Nazi occupation of Prague. He became a film reviewer for Sight and Sound in 1950, before becoming a key part of the Free Cinema short-film movement the magazine inspired. Reisz made a smooth transition to features, directing Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) and Night Must Fall (1964). In the 1970s he went to LA and made The Gambler (1974) with James Caan and Who'll Stop the Rain (1978) with Nick Nolte. The French Lieutenant's Woman united the British and Hollywood sides of his film-making and remains his crowning achievement.
His lead actors were at the outset of their careers: Meryl Streep had won a best supporting Oscar for Kramer vs Kramer (1979) but was not yet established, while Jeremy Irons was a relative unknown, yet to make his big impact on British TV with Brideshead Revisited (1981). Scriptwriter Harold Pinter had a number of screenplays under his belt, including Accident (1967) and The Go-Between (1971), both directed by Joseph Losey.
How book and film compare: After disappointing film versions of his two previous novels, Fowles was determined to keep control of the third. He tried to interest Reisz at the time of publication, but the director was reluctant to make a second period film after Isadora (1968). In 1979 Reisz reconsidered, and hired Pinter. They introduced an innovative parallel narrative about two (fictional) actors having an affair while working on the film, a self-referential device that echoed Fowles's literary stylistics. Relentless press coverage followed the shoot in Lyme in 1980 - not helped by seven boarding school girls being expelled after "partying" with the film crew.
Inspirations and influences: The film's success not only catapulted its lead actors into major careers, but also defined a lush, sexualised, colour-oriented style for 19th-century period film that initiated the modern cycle of literary adaptation. The Merchant Ivory school was the principal benefactor, with its Henry James and EM Forster adaptations of the mid-1980s.
