He recognizes that Miranda is a human being as he takes care of her and provides her everything a human would possibly need, but she’s inevitably nothing more than an object or a collectible item to him. In his mind, there is nothing morally wrong with what he intends to do (and what he actually ends up doing). The first part of the novel was told from Frederick’s point of view and it was rather alarming at his thought process. He makes preparations by buying a house out in the country, purchasing assorted objects and things he knows she will need, convinced that if he can only capture her and keep her that she will slowly grow to love him. He’s obsessed with a middle-class art student named Miranda Grey and as he continues admiring her from a distance a plan slowly starts developing in his mind that he would like to have her like one of his butterflies. The Collector is the story of Frederick Clegg, an extremely odd and lonely man who also collects butterflies. He knows that part of my beauty is being alive, but it’s the dead me he wants.

I’m meant to be dead, pinned, always the same, always beautiful. It’s when I try to flutter out of line that he hates me. Alone and desperate, Miranda must struggle to overcome her own prejudices and contempt if she is understand her captor, and so gain her freedom. When he wins the pools he buys a remote Sussex house and calmly abducts Miranda, believing she will grow to love him in time. He is obsessed with a beautiful stranger, the art student Miranda. Withdrawn, uneducated and unloved, Frederick collects butterflies and takes photographs. Genres: Classics, Contemporary, Literary Fiction, Mystery

Published by Vintage on October 21st 1998 (first published 1963)

The collector book john fowles