Elizabeth died in 1989 from cancer, 36 years after they first met. The same day, the superficially devastated widower got in touch with a neighbour and friend of theirs, for whose daughter, Sarah Smith, he had begun one of what he complacently called his ‘tendresses’, to ask whether Sarah might be interested in becoming his live-in housekeeper. Sarah’s aghast mother saw him off, so he found someone else. But once the collector started to wave his butterfly net, he was hard to escape. Eight years and several ‘companions’ on — the latter including a siren in her second year at Oxford to whom the 60-odd-year-old gave, among much else, Elizabeth’s favourite ring — Sarah Smith married him.
John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds is a model of what literary biography can be, not least in the non-literalness of its approach to truth, biographical and fictional, and to the relation between the two. Only rarely does Eileen Warburton seem a touch credulous about Fowles’s diary entries. Another biographer might have been more opinionated about the fiction (and another British publishing house might have anglicised her Americanisms: ‘opening bowler on the school’s first Eleven’; ‘Paris, France’; ‘hunter’ for a man who goes shooting, etc.). But given what Warburton has chosen to spend so long doing, no one else could have done it better.
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