The French Lieutenant's Woman

The narrator’s habit of butting in to lecture, joke, or editorialize breaks the spell for readers who wanted to sink into the story, one admitting she wanted to “tell him to shut the hell up and go away.” The Victorian-set first half runs long before the modern-narrator device pays off, one reader noting flatly that “480 pages went by a lot slower” than expected. Charles Smithson reads as unsympathetic to modern readers, especially women, who resent spending so much of the book inside his head, one calling it “impossible as a modern woman for me to truly warm to Charles.” The postmodern devices, the coin-flip ending, the narrator writing himself into the plot, strike some readers as a stunt that breaks the historical-romance spell rather than deepening it. A common verdict lands on admiration without attachment: one reader writes simply, “I ended up admiring the book more than I enjoyed it.”