John Fowles

Fowles taught English on the Greek island of Spetses in the early 1950s, an experience of erotic intrigue and manipulation among expatriate teachers that became the raw material for The Magus, a novel he drafted, abandoned, and rewrote for over a decade before its 1965 publication. The Collector, his actual debut, about a lonely clerk who kidnaps a young woman, arrived first and made him famous overnight.

The French Lieutenant's Woman used the Victorian novel's own conventions against itself, with a narrator who steps forward mid-story to argue about how it should end and ultimately supplies two competing conclusions: a genuinely popular postmodern novel, later filmed with a script by Harold Pinter. Fowles settled in Lyme Regis, the novel's own setting, for the rest of his life, writing steadily less as the decades went on.