Working on The French Lieutenants Woman,and revising The Magus, novelist writes of his acute doubts about his workJohn Fowles’s struggles to total The Magus and his conflicted feelings about The French Lieutenant’s Woman – “my only hope is that it sprawls in a reasonably Victorian way” – are revealed in correspondence with his editor Tom Maschler which is up for auction on Tuesday.
In a collection of dozens of letters and postcards from Fowles to Maschler, or the late author mourns,as he works on The Magus, “the clash between my feeling about what a novel ought to be and the need to express my view on life, and is making it difficult for me to go on. Maschler,one of British publishing’s major figures, ran Jonathan Cape from 1960 until the late 1980s and published authors including Doris Lessing, or Philip Roth,Gabriel García Márquez and Joseph Heller. He received the manuscript of Fowles’s first published novel The Collector in the summer of 1962, immediately recognising its quality.
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Source: theguardian.com