With a title like The French Lieutenant's Woman, it's gotta be a romance novel with a cover featuring some Fabio-like male model in a 19th century French army uniform that's ripped to pieces to expose his abs as some buxom wench showing a lot of thigh clings to him, and he waves a sword in the air? No? 
 Oh, so it was the basis for some award winning movie with Meryl Streep back in the '80s? Then it's got to be some boring-ass lame period piece with all kinds of proper English folk walking around with sticks up their asses as they talk about their proper English ways and how they musn't remove the sticks. Not really? Well, then what the hell is this book? 
 It's not what I was expecting, that's for sure. 
 Sarah Woodruff is a governess who has scandalized the English community of Lyme Regis by falling for a French naval officer who had been washed ashore and then left her behind after she 'ruined' herself for him. I guess back in those days, a woman couldn't just eat a bunch of ice cream, get drunk with her girlfriends and then forget about some jerk who did her wrong. Hooking up with a loser was grounds for a lifetime of people shaking their fingers at you. Sarah doesn't even have the decency to hide her shame. She insists on going out walking by the ocean, clearly pining for Frenchie, in spite of strict orders from her pious bitch employer not to walk around where decent folk can tell what she's thinking. 
 Charles Smithson is a Victorian-era gentleman engaged to Ernestina and visiting her aunt in the area. After he accidentally comes across Sarah, he gets interested in her story and tries to convince her to stop making her situation worse by being so openly miserable and letting him help arrange for better employment in London where her scandal won't be so well known. But Sarah plays a dangerous game of asking Charles for clandestine meetings for advice while acting like she has no urge to change her life. Naturally, Charles finds himself falling for her despite warnings from a local doctor that Sarah is 'addicted to melancholia' and may only be interested in spreading her misery around. 
 At first, this seems like it's going to be a pretty standard Victorian-era tragic romance. But John Fowles took some serious detours in this book. First, he openly writes it as a god-like narrator from the future who knows how silly and hypocritical a lot of English society was then. It gets even stranger when he starts writing about the writing of the story itself. He complains that characters aren't behaving the way he thought they should. Then he begins presenting alternate versions of the plot based on decisions by the characters that vastly change how the book would end as he explains that the only fair way to end the story is to present all the ways that it possibly could end. 
 It's also not entirely clear about who you should be sympathizing with here. Is Sarah a woman ahead of her time, unfairly treated by a bunch of hypocrites? Or is she a slightly unbalanced woman taking a hatred of men out on Charles by gaining his pity and love at the possible cost of his reputation? Is Charles a good man living in an age that traps him with outdated ideas of duty and honor? Is he just a selfish snob who gets cold feet about his own upcoming marriage and deliberately acts stupidly to try and stop it? It could be that all of these factors are true. Or that none of them are. 
 While I liked the writing and the way that Fowles played with the structure of a traditional novel, the problem for me is that I was so unsure about Sarah and Charles that I couldn't ever really get engaged with them emotionally. At times I felt bad for one or both of them, and at other times, I didn't like them at all. I ended up admiring the book more than I enjoyed it.