The French Lieutenant’s Woman is one the the novels that seems to make all the Top 100 lists, whether personal or commercial. They even made the novel into a motion picture starring Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons. I never felt the need to watch the movie but I was aware that it’s structure involved the contrast between a fictional story set in the 1860s and a modern-day production being filmed of that same story. I assume the themes and ironies were developed by the contrasts between the original story and the revised story being turned into a movie. But for all I know the contrasting time periods served only to make the themes seem more complex than they were.
A Celebration of Reading 