Miranda's section of the novel is comprised of rambling diary entries and reminiscences about a past life from which she has been forcibly removed. She misses her friends, college, art, relationships, but most of all she misses her freedom. Like Fred's butterflies, she's slowing suffocating in her underground cell. "'It drives me mad. I feel as if I'm at the earth's heart. I've got the whole weight of the whole earth pressing in on this little box. It grows smaller, smaller, smaller. I can feel it contracting. I want to scream." She remembers her sister, a boyfriend, past holidays, trips to the river, the sunshine, fresh air, apple trees. She knows that life's going on around her and it's almost too much to bear. Wormholes, a book of essays, was published in May 1998. The first comprehensive biography on Fowles, John Fowles–A Life in Two Worlds, was published in 2004, and the first volume of his journals appeared the same year, followed by volume two in 2006. But you put a lot of…I have the impression that you put a lot of your own personal philosophical views into your novels. I think the intellectual literary creams of both London and New York have really lost touch with what the function of literature should be.

Some literary truths are about the nature of fiction. The ones I’ve just mentioned in The French Lieutenant’s Woman are in my view truths about the artificial nature of fiction, but that has nothing to do with other kinds of truths in the book, which really are about feeling, and which of course do express opinions about life. I would consider myself a socialist, but I don’t think the novel’s really the right place for explicit socialist propaganda. The right place for that is the essay or the non-fiction book, or obviously the actual involvement in politics.

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No, not at all. I’ve never needed other human beings really, I suppose, which doesn’t mean to say I don’t enjoy meeting them sometimes, but I need other people less than most. It’s much more to do with mysterious things like climate, the sort of precocity of the West of England, that’s something I’ve always loved. The fact that spring starts here a little bit earlier than it does up country, and I adore the sea. I don’t think I could live now out of sound of the sea. I’m one of those mysterious people who loves coasts, beaches, shores, and if I had to define a perfect place to live my one constituent would always be that you go to sleep with the sound of the sea somewhere. I wrote the first draft in a month, yes, and I revised it considerably. I didn’t take a month, you know, between my starting and my completed work. Spetse. And again I had another love affair, with Greece, which was a different country in those days. Furthermore, the article could also examine the literary techniques used by Fowles in The Collector. The novel is known for its unique narrative structure, which alternates between the perspectives of Clegg and Miranda. Fowles also employs various literary devices such as symbolism, foreshadowing, and irony to enhance the themes and plot of the novel.

Because I think if you’re fully identified with society then you probably would be in another career. You would be active in society and I don’t think you would get that essential distance, the ability to judge and to criticize society, because another important function of the novel as we all know is to correct society, to criticize it. Beginning in 1968, Fowles lived on the southern coast of England in the small harbor town of Lyme Regis (the setting for The French Lieutenant’s Woman). His interest in the town’s local history resulted in his appointment as curator of the Lyme Regis Museum in 1979, a position he filled for a decade.I detect traces of it elsewhere in the English class system, but I think it’s specifically a middle-class thing. For me this is one thing which distinguishes us clearly from America. Every Englishman who goes to America has problems with irony. There are all kinds of ironic things which you can say to another Englishman, which the American, even the intelligent American, won’t get. You have to say what you mean there to communicate. Alan Pryce-Jones of The New York Times wrote of the novel: "John Fowles is a very brave man. He has written a novel which depends for its effect on total acceptance by the reader. There is no room in it for the least hesitation, the smallest false note, for not only is it written in the first person singular, but its protagonist is a very special case indeed. Mr. Fowles's main skill is in his use of language. There is not a false note in his delineation of Fred." [14] Hayden Carruth of the Press & Sun-Bulletin praised the novel as "brisk" and "professional," adding that Fowles "knows how to evoke the oblique horror of innocence as well as the direct horror of knowledge." [2] Well I think that whatever his political views, the writer should not be too swayed by intellectual fashion. There is a certain kind of contract which we were talking about just now, between the novelist and a reasonably wide audience. If the novelist uses an experimentalist style, experimental techniques, all right he’s at perfect liberty to do that, but I think he ought to ask himself the question of what good am I doing? In general he’s preaching to the converted, to the rest of avant garde, but there are all those other people out there who cannot appreciate that kind of writing. He’s missing out on them totally and that for me is not what socialism is about.