JOHN FOWLES was a novelist whose books made a resounding impact on the 1960s generation of readers of serious fiction, while at the same time enjoying great commercial success, not only in this country, but also in the United States. With The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) his reputation reached its zenith, and the more discerning sections of his enthusiastic public, who may have had doubts about the preponderating component of sheer mystery that propelled his early successes, heaved a sigh of relief.

Here, unmistakably, was a writer who could not merely produce intelligent and beguiling novels like those which had preceded it, but who was also seriously devoted to the craft of fiction, who clearly in this work demonstrated a mission to rescue the English novel from the insular parochiality into which it was seen to be falling, who, above all, was determined to resuscitate a realism of the 19th-century sort, which he thought to be the English novel’s most natural province.

From this point onwards, Fowles’s works seemed to be entitled to invite the most rigorous criticism, and they did indeed stimulate much discussion on the direction of the contemporary English novel. And yet the unease remained, and it was not generated solely by the tremendous commercial success which at that time tended to be regarded with suspicion by the more austere sections of the critical establishment.

Rather, as time went on, it became more difficult to define in what the substance and solidity claimed as Fowles’s contribution to the modern novel specifically consisted. To be regarded (perhaps with Anthony Burgess) as the most intelligent as well as technically brilliant writer in English of his generation, came to seem increasingly to be a liability, and the skills which had been hailed in Fowles’s earlier books still cried out for a substantial theme on which to deploy themselves.

This did not greatly dismay Fowles, who was happy to pursue this vein of mystery in such works as The Maggot (1985), to diversify into translation and adaptation from the French, to work on film scripts, to edit, and to chronicle local history, especially that of Lyme Regis where he had lived for many years.

John Fowles was born in 1926 at Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, the son of Robert Fowles, a prosperous cigar merchant, and his wife Gladys. He was educated at Bedford School where, he was later to say, he “learnt all about power, hierarchy and the manipulation of law”.

In 1944 he went to Edinburgh University, but was then called up into the Royal Marines, in which he served in 1945-46.

After demobilisation he went to New College, Oxford, where he read French, graduating in 1950. After Oxford, Fowles taught for a number of years, first in France at the University of Poitiers, where he was a lecturer in English for two years, and then for a year at a boys’ school on the Peloponnesian island of Spetsai.

This experience, and his enduring love of Greece, provided him with the setting for The Magus. After his Greek sojourn he returned to England and taught for ten years in London, until he became a full-time writer, emancipated from salaried employment by The Collector in 1963.

Though the book was not necessarily liked in all quarters, this story of a drab suburban clerk who sadistically imprisons a girl he admires in a foolproof prison of his own devising, financed by his football pools winnings, drew attention to its author’s disturbing powers. It was succeeded not by another novel but by The Aristos, a somewhat formidable undertaking for one seeking recognition as a novelist. In stern, numbered paragraphs, this collection of aphorisms nevertheless amounted to a fictional portrait of an earnest young man discoursing with himself on all the major themes of his times.

The Collector had been successfully filmed in 1965, but it was The Magus (1966) which gave John Fowles’s name lustre and a popular following. On a Greek island where he has gone to teach, Nicholas Urfe, the novel’s cynical and unsympathetic protagonist, is bewitched and beguiled by a manipulative Prospero-like figure and a young woman of apparently unfathomable mystery with whom Urfe falls in love, learning thereby to disdain, to his cost, the down-to-earth qualities of the Australian girlfriend he has left in London. This book gave full play to Fowles’s eclectic learning, his technical skill and range of cultural reference, as well as to his mastery of sophisticated whodunnit techniques.

Its translation into what he saw as a crudely simplified movie, which starred Michael Caine as the unfortunate Urfe, and Anthony Quinn and Candice Bergen as the mysterious denizens of the island, did not please its author. At the same time this process did, perhaps, reveal a basic vulgarity at the heart of the dazzling display of literary pyrotechnics of which the book was the vehicle.

The French Lieutenant’s Woman appeared to dispose of such objections. Here Fowles chose as his fictional terrain the Victorian period, and as his theme Victorian attitudes to love, sex and marriage, treated in the prose style of Thackeray but from the viewpoint of a 20th-century writer. The French Lieutenant’s Woman was at once historical novel and social criticism, and its alternative endings reinforced the author’s manipulative power and distance from his subject.

The meticulous historical detail, the sheer effectiveness of the plots and — for once in a Fowles novel — a sympathetic protagonist, gave the novel a large following both among cognoscenti and those who like a good love story. Its sales were prodigious, it won the WH Smith Literary Award of 1970 and it was spoken of for many years after as the most important literary event of the period.

Fowles felt deeply about the artistic achievement his book represented and, having rights over director, script and casting, delayed its appearance as a film for a number of years until Harold Pinter was secured as the screenwriter. The resulting film, which appeared in 1981, featured Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons, but though it was excellent box office, by general consent it did not match the complexity of its original.

Fowles thereafter was to suffer from the expectations his manifest capabilities raised. Daniel Martin (1977) was overlong, woolly in places and lacking in a sense of direction. And a revision of The Magus, published in the same year with the eroticism much heightened and elaborated, again suggested that Fowles’s creative inspiration had fallen foul of his gift for mystery, word painting and elegant pastiche. Mantissa (1985), for all its wealth of mythological correspondence, gave the impression of being shored up by the glossy sex that had been The Magus’s strongest suit.

But Fowles, who admitted periods of writer’s block, particularly after the death of his first wife, refused to shut up shop creatively, and extended his energies into activities outside fiction. He had always been interested in translation from the French since his version of Perrault’s Cinderella was published in 1974. His Don Juan (1981) was an adaptation of Molière and his Lorenzaccio (1983) an adaptation of the play by Alfred de Musset.

He edited John Aubrey’s Monumenta Britannica in two parts, which appeared in 1980 and 1982, and Thomas Hardy’s England (1984). Lyme Regis, became, through the long years of his sojourn there, the object of a number of studies of various kinds, ranging from A Brief History of Lyme (1981) to Lyme Worthies (2000). The Journals of John Fowles appeared in two volumes, the first in 2003 and the second this month.

As a man Fowles was retiring — almost aggressively so — preferring remote Dorset to the London literary coteries, and shunning interviews and publicity.

John Fowles married, in 1956, Elizabeth Whitton. She died of cancer in 1990, and he married Sarah Smith in 1998. There were no children.

John Fowles, author, was born on March 31, 1926. He died on November 5, 2005, aged 79.