Letters unveil John Fowles’s secret affair

John Fowles, the novelist, had a secret affair with a woman 43 years his junior, it was revealed in the Sunday Times. Even setting aside the age difference, it was a highly unusual relationship, as a cache of letters written by the author, to be auctioned at Sotheby's next month, reveal. His lover, Elena van Lieshout, who was a 21-year-old Oxford undergraduate when the romance began, appears to have adopted the persona of Sarah Woodruff, the romantic heroine of Fowles's best known novel, The French Lieutenant's Woman.

The correspondence - some 120 letters and postcards, including several unpublished love poems - reveals that while the couple shared a bed, the romance was never fully consummated because Fowles, who was 64 at the time, had suffered a stroke. This was something Fowles bitterly regretted. He wrote: "It seems barbaric at times; that I've lost all sexual potency yet not sexual feeling."

This did not stop the pair role-playing, however. One letter reveals that a month after their first meeting, they re-enacted a scene from The French Lieutenant's Woman, standing in the same place where Fowles pictured Sarah Woodruff telling Charles Smithson, her admirer in the book, of her ruinous affair. The relationship lasted two years, but seems to have cooled when Fowles suggested marriage. They remained in touch until 1998 and then appear to have lost contact.