In the novel he acknowledged the influence of psychologist Carl Jung , and such literary models as Henry James's The Turn of the Screw and Charles Dickens's Great Expectations . One of the great fallacies of our time is that the Nazis rose to power because they imposed order on chaos. Precisely the opposite is true - they were successful because they imposed chaos on order. They tore up the commandments, they denied the super-ego, what you will. They offered humanity all its great temptations.
Nothing is true, everything is permitted.
The French Lieutenant's Woman grew out of a dream the author had of a woman standing at the edge of a quay, looking out to sea. The book was adapted into screen in 1981, directed by Karel Reisz and starring Meryl Streep. The story set in the Victorian period followed the book, but the modern subplot, a film within a film, was created by Reisz and Harold Pinter, who wrote the screenplay. The novel was set largely in Lyme Regis in the 1860s and re-created the Victorian romance and the world of Thomas Hardy with his constant sense of loss and failure. In the story a wealthy amateur paleontologist Charles Smithson, a supporter of Darwin's evolution theory, falls in love with Sarah Woodruff, a passionate and imaginative governess who is believed to have been deserted by a French naval lieutenant.