"Outside of marriage, your Victorian gentleman could look forward to 2.4 fucks a week," actor Mike coolly calculates after his screen partner (and lover) Anna has read to him the statistics according to which, while London's male population in 1857 was 1 1/4 million, the city's estimated 80,000 prostitutes were receiving a total of 2 million clients per week. And frequently, Anna adds, the women thus forced to earn their living came from respectable positions like that of a governess, simply having fallen into bad luck, e.g. by being discharged after a dispute with their employer and their resulting inability to find another position.

This brief dialogue towards the beginning of this screenplay based on John Fowles's 1969 novel succinctly illustrates both the fate that would most likely have been in store for its title character Sarah, had she left provincial Lyme Regis on Dorset's Channel coast and gone to London, and the Victorian society's moral duplicity: For while no virtues were regarded as highly as honor, chastity and integrity; while no woman intent on keeping her good name could even be seen talking to a man alone (let alone go beyond that); and while marriage – like any contract – was considered sacrosanct, rendering the partner who deigned to breach it an immediate social outcast, all these rules were suspended with regard to prostitutes; women who, for whatever reasons, had sunk so low they were regarded as nonpersons and thus, inherently unable to stain anybody's reputation but their own.

Sherlock Holmes and the Lyme Regis Horror is a collection of Sherlock Holmes pastiches penned by David Ruffle.

I read a lot of Sherlock Holmes books, some good, some bad. This one is definitely in the 'good' category. The majority of the stories stray away from the confines of the Canon, and run along more of a supernatural style. Normally I prefer Sherlock Holmes pastiches that have the more traditional set up, but the author did his job very well and my interest in the stories didn’t wane for a moment.

The majority of the collection is comprised by a novella which goes by the same title as that of the book. 'The Lyme Regis Horror' is an exceptional piece of work, a story which builds up at a steady pace and the interplay between Doctor Watson and Mrs. Heidler very well handled.

The rest of the book is made up of short stories and vignettes, for me the pick of these is ‘The Trumper Affair’, a short story that mirrors Conan Doyle’s style of storytelling very well. In fact it’s the kind of story I could imagine Conan Doyle himself writing. All in all, it’s a very good book, well researched and well written – I’d recommend it to all Holmes enthusiasts.

I was really excited when this novel wound up on the final list of books we would be reading this school year with my book club.  It’s been on my TBR for ages…  I can say I’m a real fan of John Fowles having read and loved both The Magus and The Collector.  I should have known that The French Lieutenant’s Woman would challenge me immensely.  It wasn’t at all what I expected, however I liked and hated it at the same time.  Those 480 pages went by a lot slower last week than I had expected. I guess I can congratulate myself for finishing it in five days; for without the book club I may have taken a lot longer to finish it or worse not finished it at all.  The first half of the book was slow, but from about page 240 on something changed in the writing and I was hooked.

The story is complex and I’m not really sure what to tell you because I could say something that will either steer you away from it or maybe make you feel as if I’m giving you spoilers.  In a nutshell, the main characters are Sarah Woodruff and Charles Smithson.  Sarah, the French lieutenant’s woman, is a seemingly depressed character mourning a relationship that could have been.  She spends her days walking along the streets of Lyme Regis and staring out to sea.  She is an utter mystery to the end.  To the citizens of Lyme Regis she is a disgraced woman, a blemish on their tight-knit small town.  Charles, however, becomes attracted to her difference and falls in love with Sarah, while he’s engaged to the young, pretty, naive Ernestia, while defying the accepted customs and beliefs of Victorian society in 1867.

John Fowles wrote The French Lieutenant’s Woman in 1969.  It is a very experimental work because it mixes  a Victorian love story, along with an intricate critique of Victorian and modern society.  What I mean is that John Fowles presence is right there with you while you’re reading the story.  This aspect can be perceived as annoying or engaging.  At times you’ll want to tell him to shut the hell up and go away.  The consensus in my book club was that it was annoying and didn’t allow them to enjoy the story the way they would have liked.  I too felt this but some way some how midway through the book I started to enjoy the concept.  I accepted it as if John Fowles accompanied me, holding my hand through the second half of the book, showing me and informing me on life in Victorian times and critiquing modern-day simultaneously.  I had begun to accept the experiment.  The second half I loved so much I had trouble putting it down.  At times, there were footnotes that intrigued me, but also that made me smile.

The characters were all perfect and served the overall purpose for critiquing Victorian life.  Even though the story revolved around Sarah and Charles there were a myriad of other important secondary characters that make the novel great.  I would say the character of Charles is surrounded by many women considering he was motherless.  The only things he has left are his faith in science, his Victorian upper class background and education(which he has difficulty shaking), and his uncle who will hopefully leave him a healthy inheritance.

As for the film of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, released in 1981, screenplay written by Harold Pinter, I haven’t seen it yet but probably will try to since I heard only good things about it.  Starring Jeremy Irons and Meryl Streep, how can I pass on those two.  If this novel seems like a big hunk of hefty for you but you’d still like to try a novel from Fowles, I’d recommend The Collector as a good place to start.  It was his first published work in 1963, even though he’d already started writing The Magus first.  Fowles was interested and influenced by existentialist writers like Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre and this aspect is one of the common themes that runs through his novels.  Fowles was an English teacher for most of his adult life.  He taught English in France at the University of Poitiers and in Greece on the Peloponnesian island of Spetsai.  This is where he met his first wife Elizabeth Christy.  His experiences in Greece set the scene for his third successfully published novel called The Magus in 1966.  Oddly enough his second wife was called Sarah and he lived the rest of his life primarily in Lyme Regis.  He died in November 2005.