The Collector Study Guide

From an early age, Fowles was drawn to literature and the arts. He attended the Bedford School as a young man and performed exceedingly well. After graduating Bedford, Fowles studied French and German at Oxford, eventually graduating in 1950. Fowles's early career was spent teaching, including a significant stint at the Anargyrios School in Greece. It was during his teaching years that Fowles began to write seriously, drawing inspiration from existentialist philosophy and his experiences abroad. In 1963, Fowles published his debut novel, The Collector, which tells the story of a young man, Frederick Clegg, who kidnaps and imprisons a beautiful art student in his basement. The Collector was an immediate success, both commercially and critically, establishing Fowles as a significant new voice in contemporary literature. Fowles also wrote The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969), which is perhaps his most celebrated work. This novel, set in Victorian England, is notable for its metafictional style, making it decidedly postmodern. Other notable works by Fowles include The Magus (1965) and Daniel Martin (1977). John Fowles passed away on November 5, 2005, but his literary legacy endures. His work is often included in surveys of modernist and postmodernist literature, and The Collector had a major impact on what would become the modern psychological thriller.

The novel takes place in mid-20th century-England, which was undergoing significant social changes in the aftermath of World War II. These changes led to a reconfiguration of traditional class structures and the emergence of new class dynamics. Fowles’s novel depicts two characters who are on different sides of these changing dynamics, as Miranda represents the old middle class, while Clegg represents the new middle class. In particular, the aftermath of World War II saw the implementation of comprehensive social reforms, including the establishment of the National Health Service (NHS) in 1948 and the expansion of social security. These reforms aimed to address the inequalities that had become starkly apparent during the war. Furthermore, educational reforms, including the 1944 Education Act, made secondary education free and compulsory until the age of 15. Increased access to education allowed more people from working-class backgrounds to pursue higher education and ultimately enter the middle class. Although Miranda thinks of herself as a Leftist who supports the working class, her attitudes towards Clegg’s aesthetic sensibilities betray her biases. Miranda thinks that she—as a person of culture and fine aesthetic taste—knows true beauty and thinks of Clegg as an uneducated brute by comparison. Meanwhile, Clegg finds himself completely out of his depth when dealing with upper middle class people. He finds that they do not respect him and take advantage of him whenever they can. This element of the novel demonstrates that while government policies may have made England more equitable, society was still catching up.

Though Fowles is perhaps best known for his postmodern works, The Collector is a modernist novel. In this regard, Fowles’s literary career and The Collector mirror the literature of Vladimir Nabokov, whose career also straddled the transition from modernism to postmodernism. In particular, The Collector owes a great debt to Lolita, Nabokov’s most infamous novel, which was published in 1955. Lolita is a novel told from the perspective of a pedophile, Humbert Humbert, who kidnaps and sexually abuses a young girl. Throughout the novel, Humbert justifies his abuse of the young girl and presents their relationship as a love story rather than one that is inherently evil and exploitative. Although Clegg is far less self-aware than Humbert, he employs a similar rhetorical stance by always pointing the finger at someone else rather than taking responsibility for his own actions. Additionally, The Collector became an influential book in its own right, as it is now often cited as the first modern psychological thriller. Many of the most famous thrillers in the second half of the 20th century borrow heavily from The Collector’s plot and character dynamics, including Richard Laymon’s The Cellar, James Patterson’s Kiss the Girls, and Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs.