June 2014

The word quell floated into my consciousness a few weeks ago. I had no idea what it wanted from me. I envisioned the fury of a storm at sea. Over the next several days quell kept surfacing, until one night a figure standing on the edge of a quay, with back turned, emerged through the mist. Ah, the French Lieutenant’s woman, I thought. Where did that come from? The past? The present? Life as film?

In his “Notes on an Unfinished Novel” John Fowles chronicles the genesis of his 467 page work of fiction, The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Four or five months before he began, a visual image rose in his mind one morning when he was half asleep – “a woman stands at the end of an ancient quay and stares out to sea. An outcast.” He didn’t know her crime, but the image kept recurring until he began to fall in love with her.  Read More »