Britain: John Fowles, the novelist who brought sexiness and popular appeal to the serious literary novel, has died from heart failure near his home in Lyme Regis, Dorset, south-west England.
According to his wife, Sarah, he "faded away, slipped away on Saturday " after two weeks in hospital in Axminster. "His heart just gave out - gave up, really," she said.
Fowles, who was 79, will be best remembered for the romantic The French Lieutenant's Woman, a daring, meticulous and sexy treatment of the Victorian novel which gives it a postmodern twist of alternative endings.
"It was unbelievably exploratory," said his publisher, Dan Franklin of Jonathan Cape. "The two endings were absolutely revolutionary when it came out."
Harold Pinter adapted The French Lieutenant's Woman for a film directed by Karel Reisz and starring Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons. "It looks good but it is somehow empty at the heart," the author said of it.
The novel, and works such as The Collector, and the self-consciously allusive and playful The Magus (he described it to his wife as "a young person's book"), have been widely influential. According to John Mullan, professor of English at University College London, Fowles established that: "A highly literary novel could also be a potential bestseller ... he offered readers literary pleasure as well as the voltage they expected from contemporary fiction."
His last novel was published in 1985. In 1988 he had a stroke; in 1990 his first wife, Elizabeth, died of cancer.
A second volume of diaries is forthcoming, promising revelations about his turbulent relationship with Elizabeth, friends such as the publisher Tom Maschler, and the writing of The French Lieutenant's Woman. - (Guardian Service)