Writing and the Self: John Fowles’ Autobiographical Non-Fiction

One of the greatest novelists of the twentieth-century English Literature, John Robert Fowles (1926-2005), claims that he has always wanted to write poetry and philosophy. Despite the lack of the same critical interest in his non-fiction as in his fiction, it is his non-fiction as well as his fiction where Fowles makes clear what it means to him to be a writer, and a novelist in particular. Some of Fowles’ essays specially represent his obsessions with and passions for writing as a prolific novelist. He says, for example, referring to this idea that writing is a natural process like love. Moreover, Fowles’ essays quickly remind the reader of especially his fiction of the notions and the themes that he has already dealt with in his novels. In addition to all these, Fowles surprisingly confesses in one of his essays that a simple image of a woman standing at the end of a deserted quay and staring out to sea was how one of his most famous and one of his most acclaimed novels of the twentieth-century English literature came to life (This novel is the writer’s 1969 work, The French Lieutenant’s Woman.). Fowles, in his essays, does not hesitate to talk about the difficulties he had either. Writing, for Fowles, is a very personal business. Fiction making is creating another world. It is a godgame where the novelist even falls in love with his heroine