Teaching Fowles spent his early adult life as a teacher. His first year after Oxford was spent at the
University of Poitiers. At the end of the year, he received two offers: one from the French department at
Winchester, the other "from a ratty school in Greece," Fowles said: "Of course, I went against all the dictates of
common sense and took the Greek job." In 1951, Fowles became an English master at the Anargyrios and Korgialenios School of Spetses on the
Peloponnesian island of
Spetses (also known as Spetsai). This opened a critical period in his life, as the island was where he met his future wife. Inspired by his experiences and feelings there, he used it as the setting of his novel
The Magus (1966). Fowles was happy in Greece, especially outside the school. He wrote poems that he later published, and became close to his fellow expatriates. But during 1953, he and the other masters at the school were all dismissed for trying to institute reforms, and Fowles returned to England. On the island of Spetses, Fowles had developed a relationship with Elizabeth Christy, née Whitton, then married to another teacher, Roy Christy. That marriage was already ending because of Fowles. Although they returned to England at the same time, they were no longer in each other's company. It was during this period that Fowles began drafting
The Magus. His separation from Elizabeth did not last long. On 2 April 1957, they were married. Fowles became stepfather to Elizabeth's daughter from her first marriage, Anna. For nearly ten years, he taught English as a foreign language to students from other countries at
St. Godric's College, an all-girls establishment in
Hampstead, London.
Literary career – Fowles's home in
Lyme Regis In late 1960, though he had already drafted
The Magus, Fowles began working on
The Collector. He finished his first draft of
The Collector in a month, but spent more than a year making revisions before showing it to his agent. Michael S. Howard, the publisher at
Jonathan Cape, was enthusiastic about the manuscript. The book was published in 1963 and when the paperback rights were sold in the spring of that year, it was "probably the highest price that had hitherto been paid for a first novel," according to Howard. British reviewers found the novel to be an innovative thriller, and several American critics detected a serious promotion of existentialist thought. The success of
The Collector meant that Fowles could stop teaching and devote himself full-time to a literary career. Film rights to the book were optioned and it was adapted as
a feature film of the same name in 1965. Against the advice of his publisher, Fowles insisted that his second published book be
The Aristos, a non-fiction collection of philosophy essays. Afterward, he set about collating all the drafts he had written of what would become his most studied work,
The Magus. In this novel, Fowles created one of the most enigmatic female characters in literary history. His conception of femininity and myth of masculinity as developed in this text is psychoanalytically informed. In the same year, he adapted
The Magus for cinema, and the film was released in 1968. ''The French Lieutenant's Woman'' (1969) was released to critical and popular success. It was translated into more than ten languages, and established Fowles's international reputation. It was adapted as
a feature film in 1981 with a screenplay by the noted British playwright (and later Nobel laureate)
Harold Pinter, and starring
Meryl Streep and
Jeremy Irons. Fowles lived the rest of his life in Lyme Regis. His works
The Ebony Tower (1974),
Daniel Martin (1977),
Mantissa (1982), and
A Maggot (1985) were all written from Belmont House. In 1980 he wrote a highly appreciative introduction to
G. B. Edwards's
The Book of Ebenezer Le Page (Hamish Hamilton, 1981), the fictional autobiography set in Guernsey: 'There may have been stranger literary events than the book you are about to read but I rather doubt it' (reprinted in his
Wormholes: Essays and Occasional Writings, ed. Jan Relf (Jonathan Cape, 1998), pp. 166–74. Fowles composed a number of poems and short stories throughout his life, most of which were lost or destroyed. In December 1950 he wrote
My Kingdom for a Corkscrew.
For A Casebook (1955) was rejected by various magazines. In 1970 he wrote
The Last Chapter. In 2008 Fowles was named by
The Times as one of the fifty greatest British writers since 1945. == Personal life ==