A secret cache of love letters reveals how John Fowles, author of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, re-enacted his epic story of forbidden passion with a young student.
More than 20 years after he wrote the novel, Fowles embarked on a passionate affair with Elena van Lieshout, a 21-year-old Oxford undergraduate who modelled herself on Sarah Woodruff, the flighty heroine of his most famous work.
Though Elena never stood amid the wind and waves at the end of a stone pier like Meryl Streep in the famous image from the 1981 film version, she and Fowles visited the spot on the cliffside above Lyme Regis where in the book Woodruff tells her admirer of her disastrous affair with a French army officer.
The letters reveal that despite being old enough to be her grandfather, the author and undergraduate shared a bed. The romance was never fully consummated because Fowles, who was 64, had suffered a stroke, but the relationship was sexual.
In one letter Fowles, who also wrote The Collector, a novel about a man who collects butterflies and then takes a girl captive, apologises for going too far.
The 120 letters and postcards, including some unpublished love poems, were sent by Fowles, who died in 2005, over a two-year period. “Dearest Leni,” he would write, quoting the songwriter Cole Porter. “In the words of that all-time cliché, you’re under my skin.”
The letters have been consigned anonymously to Sotheby’s where they are expected to sell for at least £30,000 at auction in London next month. Van Lieshout was 21 when she was first invited to Belmont House, Fowles’s home near Lyme Regis, Dorset, in July 1990. The writer’s wife Elizabeth had died of cancer a few months before and he was becoming increasingly reclusive.
A student at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, with ambitions to be a concert pianist, actress or novelist, van Lieshout had been visiting the area since her teens, taking long lonely walks in the manner of Woodruff who wanders along the sea as scandalised villagers gossip about her longing for her French lover to return. Van Lieshout had taken a summer job as a waitress. Hearing of the death of Fowles’s wife, she put a note expressing her condolences through his door. He invited her to afternoon tea.
Fowles had long had the capacity to inhabit a “fantasy world” inspired by his own writing, according to his biographer Eileen Warburton, and in the student he seems to have found someone with a similar capacity.
Despite the 43-year age gap, the two began an intense friendship, with her moving into Belmont House for the summer. A month after their meeting, they stood at the place where Fowles pictured Woodruff telling Charles Smithson, her admirer, of her ruinous affair with the French lieutenant.
Van Lieshout, the relatively unworldly student, played the role of the woman with a supposedly dark past. She spoke, Fowles recollected, “in little spurts of confession . . . not quite unconsciously repeating the role of Sarah in The FLW . . . the outwardly demure but inwardly self-consumed woman, obsessed by her own freedom”.
Later Fowles wrote to her: “I was one eighth of the way into thinking you were just an ordinary girl, one of those Oxford would-be bluestockings, really rather silly; but now I’m back at square one, late as always, there’s this odd creature at the door, across the cobbles, nervous — demure, and I think, oh Christ, I nearly forgot and walk towards you, into something so much more than just sex, just friendship, just curiosity.”
The real and fictional women seemed strikingly similar to him: to van Lieshout he wrote how “sometimes you seem running and screaming from some great horror in life”. He frequently drew attention to the outwardly “demure” appearance that she shared with Woodruff.
Fowles initially explained the extraordinary setup to her parents as a friendship and criticised the prudish reaction of the locals: “She has brought a happiness into being I thought had gone forever when my wife died last March. Everyone in Lyme — and no doubt elsewhere — always jumps to the most disgraceful conclusions when you say things like that, but we know what has happened is strangely different.” However, by the time of her return to Oxford, he told them of his wish that they should marry.
Fowles poured out his feelings in his letters and candidly expressed his horror at the fact that he was physically unable to consummate the relationship fully. He quoted to van Lieshout a passage he had written in his diary: “It seems barbaric at times; that I’ve lost all sexual potency yet not sexual feeling. That I want Elena, and she can’t want me.”
Warburton, the author of John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds, believes “Elena for Fowles was the embodiment of the fey, come-hither female characters of his novels”. In an unpublished sonnet sent to van Lieshout, Fowles presented himself like the French Lieutenant’s Woman. Woodruff is described in the novel as “like a living memorial to the drowned” when she looks out to sea for the lover who has abandoned her.
Fowles in the poem puts himself on the same part of the coast, Seatown Beach: You know the book I carry in my heart, How she was me, now I am her. I love Your sea, yet I am lost without her land.
Peter Selley, director of Sotheby’s books department, who is handling the sale, described the relationship between Fowles and van Lieshout as “an archetypal mentor and admirer kind of relationship which we’ve seen dramatised countless times in literature and history”.
Ronnie Payne, a lifelong friend of Fowles, described van Lieshout, who later joined the police force in her native Wales, as a “bright and sparky” young woman “who had fallen under the spell of the great novelist”.
She eventually balked at the seriousness of the relationship. On her return to Oxford, to do her finals, Fowles said “all life lies in a little room on the river in Oxford”.
He wrote in December 1991: “I sense that you would like to drop it, the being half-engaged, whatever you want to call it. Fine, you are held to nothing . . . but we made a show of putting on shackles much too early.”
They remained in touch until 1998, around the time Fowles married Sarah Smith, an advertising executive and friend of his first wife. In the last interview he gave before his death at the age of 79, he commented on the parallels in his life and fiction: “You are every character you write.”
Van Lieshout, who has Dutch and Welsh parents, went to the funeral but friends of Fowles say they have now lost touch with her. The University of Austin, Texas, which holds the majority of Fowles’s archive, said it would like to acquire the letters. Thomas Staley, director of the university’s manuscript centre, said: “John could be tough but there was a helplessness about him as well.”
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