Heide Ziegler and Christopher Bigsby (London: Junction Books, 1982) p. John Fowles, quoted in The Radical Imagination and the Liberal Tradition, ed. Barnum, The Fiction of John Fowles: a Myth for Our Time (Greenwood, FL: Penkevill Publ. Annette Lavers (1957 London: Paladin, 1973) pp. Martin Gardner (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970) p.

See Lewis Carroll, The Annotated Alice, ed. Roy Newquist, ‘John Fowles’, in Counterpoint (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1964) pp. Quoted in Joshua Gilder, ‘John Fowles: a Novelist’s Dilemma’, Saturday Review (October 1981) 39. John Fowles, quoted by Katherine Tarbox, in The Art of John Fowles (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988) p. John Fowles, quoted by Susana Onega, in Form and Meaning in the Novels of John Fowles (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989) p. John Fowles, quoted by Christopher Bigsby, in The Radical Imagination and the Liberal Tradition, ed. Quoted by Robert Robinson, in ‘Giving the Reader a Choice: a Conversation with John Fowles’, The Listener 584.

Quoted in John Baker, John Fowles’, Publishers Weekly (25 November 1974) 7. Mel Gussow, ‘Talk with John Fowles’, New York Times Book Review (13 November 1977) 84. Simon Loveday, The Romances of John Fowles (London: Macmillan, 1985) p. 2 ‘It wasn’t until I’d finished the title story’, he added, ‘that I was struck by the echoes of the old French tale of Eliduc, and I wrote that in, and the incident of killing the weasel on the road, afterward.’ 3 Later, however, in an interview with John Baker, he emphasised that the stories struck him as being variations on his earlier fictions only after he had written them, and spoke of being ‘amused by the detective work some critics have put in trying to find the links between them’. 1 In a note to the second story, ‘Eliduc’ (actually a translation of a twelfth-century tale by Marie de France), he says that the ‘working title of this collection of stories was Variations, by which I meant to suggest variations both on certain themes in previous books of mine and in methods of narrative presentation…’ (117).

Inspiration to write The Ebony Tower stories came to Fowles suddenly, and he interrupted work on both Daniel Martin and his revision of The Magus to give them his full attention.

The ebony tower