John Fowles was born in 1926. He won international recognition with The Collector, his first published title, in 1963. He was immediately acclaimed as an outstandingly innovative writer of exceptional imaginative power, and this reputation was confirmed with the appearance of his subsequent works: The Aristos, The Magus, The French Lieutenant's Woman, The Ebony Tower, Daniel Martin, Mantissa, and A Maggot. John Fowles died in Lyme Regis in 2005. Two volumes of his Journals have recently been published; the first in 2003, the second in 2006.

John Fowles

PublicationStatus

Brand

Format

AgeRange

Series

Imprint

CategoryLabel

Full-cast dramatisations of John Fowles' three best-known novels, with star casts 
 
John Fowles won international acclaim for his innovative, allusive novels The Collector, The Magus and The French Lieutenant's Woman. All were critical and commercial successes, translated into several languages and adapted as feature films. This collection brings together the BBC Radio adaptations of these three modern classics, with stellar casts including Judi Dench, Charles Dance and John Hurt. 
 
The Collector - When a lonely, obsessional office clerk wins a fortune on the football pools, he turns from collecting butterflies to 'collecting' a beautiful art student... This dark, disturbing dramatisation stars Judi Dench and Nigel Anthony. 
 
The Magus - Disillusioned young graduate Nick Urfe accepts a teaching post on an idyllic Greek island. There, he meets the mysterious Maurice Conchis, and becomes embroiled in a world of bizarre encounters and psychological tricks. As reality and illusion intertwine, what strange game is Conchis playing with Nick? Tom Burke, Charles Dance and Hayley Atwell star in this eerie, Lynchian drama. 
 
The French Lieutenant's Woman - Lyme Regis, 1867. Gentleman naturalist Charles Smithson is engaged to be married to the respectable Ernestina - but when he falls in love with notorious social outcast Sarah Woodruff, his complacent snobbery is shattered. Narrated by John Hurt, this multi-layered tale of forbidden passions in Victorian Dorset stars Jonathan Firth and Emily Bruni. 
 
 
Text copyright © John Fowles 1963 (The Collector), 1966, 1977 (The Magus), 1969 (The French Lieutenant's Woman) 
 
The Collector 
Miranda - Judi Dench 
Clegg - Nigel Anthony 
Other parts played by Douglas Blackwell, Martin Friend, Jane Knowles and John Rowe 
Adapted by David Parker 
Produced by Richard Wortley 
First broadcast BBC Radio 4, 31 July 1972 
 
The Magus 
Nick - Tom Burke 
Conchis - Charles Dance 
Lily - Hayley Atwell 
Alison - Anna Skellern 
Margaret - Josie Taylor 
Mitford - David Seddon 
Meli - Chris Pavlo 
Rowena - Lynsey-Anne Moffat 
Anton - Maarten Dannenberg 
German Colonel - Bodo Friesecke 
Greek resistance fighter/Ticket seller - Andreas Karras 
Lily de Seitas - Beth Goddard 
Kemp - Rachel Atkins 
Briggs - Michael Shelford 
Mrs Marks - Elaine Claxton 
Benji - Rudi Goodman 
Adapted by Adrian Hodges 
Produced and directed by Heather Larmour 
Harpsichordist: Maggie Cole 
Recorder player: Martin Feinstein 
First broadcast BBC Radio 4, 20 March-3 April 2016 
 
The French Lieutenant's Woman 
Narrator - John Hurt 
Charles - Jonathan Firth 
Sarah - Emily Bruni 
Ernestina - Kelly Reilly 
Mrs Tranter - Elizabeth Spriggs 
Dr Grogan - TP McKenna 
Mrs Poulteney/Mrs Endicott - Susan Jameson 
Sam - Nick Sayce 
Mary - Ella Smith 
Dairyman/Mr Freeman - Gerard McDermott 
Mrs Fairley/Mrs Rogers - Colleen Prendergast 
Ostler/Montague - Wayne Foskett 
Prostitute - Sophie Roberts 
Curate - John Cummins 
Dramatised by Graham White 
Produced by Peter Kavanagh 
First broadcast BBC World Service, 23-30 September 2006 
 
© 2022 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd. 
(p) 2022 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd

John Fowles: The Collector, The Magus & The French Lieutenant’s Woman

Three BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisations

In this series of moving recollections involving both his childhood and his work as a mature artist, John Fowles explains the impact of nature on his life and the dangers inherent in our traditional urge to categorise, to tame and ultimately to possess the landscape. This acquisitive drive leads to alienation and an antagonism to the apparent disorder and randomness of the natural world. 
 
For John Fowles the tree is the best analogue of prose fiction, symbolising the wild side of our psyche, and he stresses the importance in art of the unpredictable, the unaccountable and the intuitive. 
 
This fascinating text gives a unique insight into the author and offers the key to a true understanding of the inspiration for his work.

The Tree

WITH AN AFTERWORD FROM THE AUTHOR 
 
'A major work of mounting tensions in which the human mind is the guinea-pig... Mr Fowles has taken a big swing at a difficult subject and his hits are on the bull's eye' Sunday Times 
 
On a remote Greek Island, Nicholas Urfe finds himself embroiled in the deceptions of a master trickster. As reality and illusion intertwine, Urfe is caught up in the darkest of psychological games. John Fowles expertly unfolds a tale that is lush with over-powering imagery in a spellbinding exploration of human complexities. By turns disturbing, thrilling and seductive, The Magus is a feast for the mind and the senses.

The Magus

Two years after The Collector had brought him international recognition and a year before he published The Magus, John Fowles set out his ideas on life in The Aristos. The chief inspiration behind them was the fifth century BC philosopher Heraclitus. In the world he posited of constant and chaotic flux the supreme good was the Aristos, 'of a person or thing, the best or most excellent its kind'.'What I was really trying to define was an ideal of human freedom (the Aristos) in an unfree world,' wrote Fowles in 1965. He called a materialistic and over-conforming culture to reckoning with his views on a myriad of subjects - pleasure and pain, beauty and ugliness, Christianity, humanism, existentialism, socialism

The Aristos

In 1963 John Fowles won international recognition with his first published novel The Collector. But his roots as a serious writer can be traced back long before to the journal he began as a student at Oxford in the late 1940s and continued to keep faithfully over the next half century. Written with an unsparing honesty and forthrightness, it reveals the inner thoughts and creative development of one of the twentieth century's most innovative and important novelists. 
 
This first-hand account of the road to fame and fortune holds the reader's attention with all the narrative power of the novels, but also offers an invaluable insight into the intimate relationship between Fowles's own life and his fiction.

The Journals Volume 1

The first volume of John Fowles's Journals ended with him achieving international literary renown after the publication of The Collector and The Magus, and leaving London behind to live in a remote house near Lyme Regis. This final volume charts the rewards and struggles of his continuing literary career, but at the same time reveals the often reluctant celebrity behind the outward success. 
 
Enjoying a reputation as one of the world's leading novelists, Fowles wins enormous wealth, kudos and attention, has the satisfaction of seeing The French Lieutenant's Woman turned into a highly acclaimed Hollywood film, but none the less comes to regard his fame with deep ambivalence. 
 
It cannot repair the growing strains between himself and his wife Elizabeth, who does not share his taste for rural isolation, nor can it cure the disenchantment he feels for an increasingly materialist society. 
 
This concluding volume of the Journals marks a writer's continuing quest for wisdom and self-understanding.

The Journals

Volume 2

Here, for the first time, is a riveting collection of Fowles's fugitive and intensely personal writings composed sinced 1963, ranging from essays and literary criticism to commentaries, autobiographical statements, memoirs and musings. Wormholes is a delicious sampling of the various matters that have plagued, preoccupied, or delighted Fowles throughout his life; it is a rich mine of essays as art and a `geography' of the mind of one of the twentieth century's greatest novelists.

Wormholes

Essays and Occasional Writings

An extraordinary work of fiction, from one of the world's most exceptional writers. 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JULIAN FELLOWES 
 
After graduating from Oxford, Daniel Martin moved to America and successfully pursued the dreams of many: he became a Hollywood screenwriter. But, as the years go by, Daniel grows more and more unsatisfied with the life he once coveted and the person he has become. Now Daniel has been called back to England to reconcile with a dying friend, but finds that he must also reconcile with the past and with himself. 
 
'I find it disastrous to read any of John Fowles' books - once I pick one up, I cannot put it down so everything else gets ignored!' Judi Dench, Daily Express 
 
'An instant masterpiece. It is a tour de force of stamina and subtlety' Daily Telegraph

Daniel Martin

An extraordinary work of fiction, from one of the world's most exceptional writers. 
 
A journalist visits an elderly painter and becomes intrigued by his young female companions. Four years' worth of book research is set on fire in front of a writer. A successful MP disappears without a trace. 
 
Written with stylistic innovation, this sequence of novellas exploring the nature of art echoes the themes and preoccupations of Fowles' earlier work and cements his position as a master storyteller. 
 
'Pick up any of these stories and you won't, as they say, be able to put it down' Financial Times

The Ebony Tower

'A remarkable performance... As gripping as The Collector and The Magus' Observer 
 
Charles Smithson, a respectable engaged man, meets Sarah Woodruff as she stands on the Cobb at Lyme Regis, staring out to sea. Charles falls in love, but Sarah is a disgraced woman, and their romance will defy all the stifling conventions of the Victorian age. 
 
Widely acclaimed since publication, The French Lieutenant's Woman is the best-loved of John Fowles's novels.

The French Lieutenant's Woman

Nicholas Urfe, a young British graduate, runs away from his monotonous life to take up a teaching post on the small Greek island of Phraxos. There he meets the enigmatic figure of Maurice Conchis, and slowly gets drawn into a world full of strange encounters and psychological tricks on Conchis's estate at Bourani. 
 
When Conchis introduces Nicholas to the enchanting and mysterious Lily Montgomery, reality and illusion begin to intertwine. But what strange game is Conchis playing with Nicholas? And, in this world coloured by artifice and deception, who is really telling him the truth? 
 
First published in 1965, John Fowles's novel The Magus soon gained cult status. Now acclaimed dramatist and screenwriter Adrian Hodges (My Week with Marilyn, The Go-Between, Peter and Wendy, The Musketeers, Survivors, Primeval) has adapted the novel for this new dramatisation starring Tom Burke (War and Peace, The Musketeers) as Nicholas Urfe, Charles Dance (And Then There Were None, Game of Thrones) as Maurice Conchis, and Hayley Atwell (Agent Carter, Brideshead Revisited) as Lily. 
 
Produced and directed by Heather Larmour.

A BBC Radio 4 full cast dramatisation

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY EVIE WYLD 
 
'There is not a page in this first novel which does not prove that its author is a master storyteller' New York Times 
 
Weird, withdrawn, and unloved, Fred is a young collector of butterflies. One day his eye alights on a beautiful stranger, the art student Miranda, and an obsession starts to form. So when Fred wins some money he decides to use the money to compensate for his unfair start and to get what he really wants - Miranda. If she could only get to know him she might start to love him. And so with the meticulous attention to detail of an experienced collector he calmly plans her abduction.

The Collector

An extraordinary work of fiction, from one of the world's most exceptional writers. 
 
The year is 1736 and five travellers are journeying across Exmoor on horseback, their purpose unknown. One evening they stop at a village inn for some rest and, soon after, hear that a man has been hanged nearby and that another is missing. What follows is a maze of beguiling paths and wrong turnings, rituals and revelations, unaccountable motives and cryptic deeds, as the mystery swerves towards a startling vision at its centre. 
 
'This altogether admirable novel serves, as all literature should, the forces of subversion' Anthony Burgess, Observer 
 
'The reader is carried headlong into a maze of violent death, bizarre sex, disguise and terror' Sunday Times

A Maggot

Miles Green wakes up in a mysterious hospital with no idea of how he got there or who he is. He definitely doesn't remember his wife, or his children's names. An impossibly shapely specialist doctor tells him his memory nerve-centre is connected to sexual activity, and calls in the even shapelier Nurse Cory to assist with treatment... In the most unorthodox of hospital rooms we eavesdrop on the serious discourse, virulent abuse and hilarious mockery of the erotic guerilla war that is Mantissa.

Mantissa

Nigel Tattersfield

`I pray people will read this richly detailed and absorbing book, with its vivid renaissance of a matter most of us English seem to have wished into oblivion. ' John Fowles Meticulously kept by Walter Prideaux, the log of the Daniel and Henry provides an astonishing record of a trading venture in the year 1700. Two years earlier, the Guinea trade had been prised loose by an Act of Parliament from the monopoly of the Royal African Company, and respectable burghers in a dozen small provincial ports seized what they saw as an opportunity for quick rewards from the slave trade. Few of these merchants knew anything of trading in Africa, nor of the unscrupulous tribalchiefs who readily offered men, women and children in hard bargaining for beads, alcohol, weapons and gunpowder. In the second part of this book, Tattersfield went in search of long-forgotten documents to chart how small provincial ports fared both economically and morally in the early years of slave trading.

Showing results for: ‘John Fowles’

Filters

Category

Publication Date

Format

Imprint

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter