His other cousin goes to Australia and never sees him again, but as soon as Uncle Dick dies, he moves out and starts collecting butterflies. One of them, Mabel, whom Ferdinand dislikes taking care of, is a spastic girl who needs assistance while walking. For the rest of his youth, his Aunt Annie and his Uncle Dick bring him up in the lower class suburbs of London, along with his two cousins. After that, his mother goes off with another man. His father dies in a car-crash when he is just two years old. We find out that the title character, Frederick, or Ferdinand, as he prefers to be called, had a very unhappy and lonely childhood. The first part presents the collector’s view of the story. The book can be read as a thriller viewed, in turn, from the point of view of the two characters. He holds her captive, without any connection to the outside world, in the hope that she will eventually grow to know and love him.

He fulfills her every need except her want to be free. He treats her nicely, buying all she desires in terms of food, clothes, books, music, and art. After a long period of preparations and observations, he forcefully brings Miranda to his own cellar, especially modified to house her for a long time. The Collector presents the struggle of a girl who has built her own reality through memories in order to survive forced seclusion.Īfter winning the lottery, Ferdinand Clegg, a lonely entomologist, buys a big house in the countryside and kidnaps Miranda Grey, a beautiful twenty-one years old art student with whom he has been obsessed for some time. The Magus puzzles us with its world of dreams and realities on a Greek island, while Sarah Woodruff from The French Lieutenant’s Woman creates her own world, wills herself to be an outsider, a “femme fatale”, apart from convention and history. The most commercially successful, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, appeared in 1969 and won several awards and was made into a well-received film (1981) starring Meryl Streep in the title role.Ī recurring theme in all the three novels mentioned above is Fowles’s vision of the world as having a double reality. The Magus, published in 1965, has generated the most lasting interest, becoming something of a cult novel, particularly in the United States of America. Readers at large better know John Fowles for two of his most acclaimed novels. His first novel, The Collector, published in 1963, has been reprinted several times and has been translated into many languages, thus proving that Fowles’s early works are still of interest to the public. John Fowles is a well-known British author (1926 – 2005) who has dedicated his life to the world of literature. “We all want things we can’t have.” (John Fowles, The Collector)

Vintage fowles the collector