The Collector

The Collector is a thriller by the English writer John Fowles, published in 1963 and his first novel. It was adapted into a film in 1965.

Frederick Clegg is a lonely young man who collects butterflies and has watched a young art student, Miranda Grey, from a distance for a long time. When he wins money on the football pools he buys a house in the country with a converted cellar, and puts it to a use he has been planning.

He takes Miranda and holds her in the cellar, telling himself that if he is patient she will come to understand him. The novel is divided in two: Frederick tells his side first, and then Miranda's diary gives hers, and the two accounts do not agree.

Fowles wrote the book between 1960 and 1962, and the pairing of the two narrators is what gives it its shape, since the reader has to hold both versions at once. He sets the suburban clerk and the art student from a bohemian family against each other as much as he sets captor against captive. It is a standalone novel.