John Fowles

Ferdinand has always loved collecting butterflies, but when he becomes obsessed with a young college student, he decides to add her to his collection, against her wishes.

A parallel narrative of a Victorian-era gentleman and the social outcast he risks everything to love, and of the contemporary actors cast in those roles and immersed in their own forbidden affair.

A woman, ostracized by Victorian society and abandoned by her French lieutenant lover, fascinates a man who resolves to unravel the mystery of her clandestine past.