The French Lieutenant’s Woman was released in 1981, directed by Karel Reisz with a screenplay by Harold Pinter, starring Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons. The film is widely considered one of the most successful literary adaptations ever made — not because it faithfully reproduces the novel (which would be impossible) but because Pinter found a cinematic equivalent for Fowles’s literary devices that is genuinely creative rather than merely illustrative.
Fowles’s 1969 novel is postmodern: it has an intrusive narrator who comments on the story, offers alternative endings, and draws attention to the artifice of fiction. This is untranslatable to cinema in direct terms. Pinter’s solution was to create a dual narrative: the Victorian story (Charles and Sarah, the melodrama of a gentleman drawn to a mysterious “fallen woman”) is intercut with a modern story in which the actors playing Charles and Sarah (Mike and Anna) are having an affair during the film’s production. The modern story provides the self-reflexive commentary that the novel’s narrator provides — making explicit the parallels between Victorian sexual mores and modern ones, between fictional possession and real desire.
The screenplay earned Pinter an Academy Award nomination and demonstrated his ability to work at the highest level of cinematic adaptation — not translating novels to screen but reinventing them in cinematic terms. The film’s dual structure — which seems so natural now — was radically innovative in 1981 and has influenced subsequent literary adaptations.
Collecting The French Lieutenant’s Woman (screenplay)
Screenplay publication (Jonathan Cape/Little, Brown, 1981): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $30–$75
- Signed copies: $100–$300