Fowles admits: 'Well, exactly, by irony I wrote a book which made this town popular. It seems a tad rich of him to complain, however mildly, of gawpers, especially since TFLW - made, in 1981, into a five-Oscar-nominated movie with Meryl Streep - single-handedly catapulted Lyme Regis into the spotlight. He only leaves his bedroom to sit in the delightfully overgrown garden below, looking out across treetops to the sea, rather like the eponymous heroine of The French Lieutenant's Woman - or, as Sarah abbreviates it, TFLW. Even Sarah, a senior advertising executive, spends much of the week in London. And they don't realise that very often that gets on one's nerves.' A writer, well-known, more-or-less living on his own, will be persecuted by his readers. 'I know I have a reputation as a cantankerous man of letters and I don't try and play it down. Hence his self-imposed, 40-year exile, hidden away in this magnificently shambolic house on the south coast.

A born recluse, he despises parties and pomp, is uneasy around other writers - he dislikes 'vain' Martin Amis in particular - and shuns fame even more than he craves attention. He is demanding beyond belief.'įowles is hard work. Sarah, who handles him in the manner of some public school matron, says wearily: 'I do adore him, but it is very difficult. This is, I realise, by far the best way of dealing with Fowles, as a supremely gifted but slightly naughty schoolboy. 'Can I say that?' She shrugs indulgently: 'You do what you fucking like.' Sheepish, he grins. He is her 'sick pig' Fowles calls her Rats: 'She of the Ravishing Auburn Tresses.'įowles is constantly tripping off at bizarre tangents, zooming from his father's 'ghastly' attempt at a novel to his love of France, a recurrent theme: 'I think in French, you know.' He looks across to his wife, sitting quietly in the corner. Today, he is nursed at his rambling seaside refuge in Lyme Regis by Sarah, 20 years his junior, an old friend of Elizabeth's.

In 1988, two years before Elizabeth, his wife of 33 years, died of cancer, he had a stroke, followed by heart surgery. This is probably the last interview John Fowles will do.

A maggot by john fowles