While the musical reference Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle (1911) told the story of Duke Bluebeard who warns his new bride Judith not to open any of the seven doors in his castle.

The news story Fowles mentioned concerned “a man who had kidnapped a girl and imprisoned her for several weeks in an air-raid shelter at the bottom of his garden.” But the whole idea of the woman-in-the-dungeon has interested me since I saw Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle, which was before the air-raid shelter case.įilm poster for ‘The Collector’ starring Terence Stamp and Samantha Eggar, 1965. all this came from a newspaper incident of some years ago (there was a similar case in the North of England last year, by the way). In a letter written to Maschler in July 1962, the author explained his sources when writing the novel: Fowles was adamant-he wanted the book published under his own name.Īnyone familiar with The Collector may have wondered what inspired Fowles’ twisted tale. Tom Maschler at Cape thought The Collector a powerful and impressive debut, but was concerned that Fowles (who thought of himself a “serious writer”) may damage his reputation with such a lurid and disturbing tale. Howard who liked it and passed it on to the publishers Jonathan Cape. Fowles wrote the book in about a month, and thinking he had nothing to lose sent the manuscript off to his agent, Michael S. Though Fowles had been writing for fifteen years completing two novels and an early draft of his second book The Magus, he considered himself “unpublishable.” Then he started work on a dark and disturbing tale about a man who kidnaps a young art student and keeps her imprisoned in the basement of his home. John Fowles was a 37-year-old school teacher when his first novel The Collector was published in 1963.

The collector book john fowles