The French Lieutenant's Woman

Fowles's Lyme Regis is a small Dorset seaside town in 1867, where a gentleman's certainties come apart on a stone breakwater. The map holds the Cobb and the town, runs west into the tangled wilderness of the Undercliff, then follows the story inland to Exeter and up to London.

Charles Smithson

The Cobb, Lyme Regis

Chapter 1

The book opens on the Cobb, the long curving stone arm that reaches out from the town into the bay. Charles and his fiancee are walking it when he first sees a still, dark figure at the seaward end, staring out to sea, and cannot look away. The breakwater is real and still stands, the same weathered stone underfoot.

Chapter 1

explicit Fowles names the Cobb outright and opens the novel on it. Sited on the great curved breakwater that shelters the harbour.

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