Madam, - The writer of the obituary of John Fowles in last Saturday's edition is incorrect in suggesting that the famous last sentence of The French Lieutenant's Woman derives from Moby-Dick.
The phrase that features in the sentence, "the unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea", would certainly not look out of place in Melville's classic, but it is in fact the last line of Matthew Arnold's poem, "To Marguerite - continued" (number five in the sequence "Switzerland"). Arnold habitually used the sea as a metaphor for the unstable, the chaotic and the alien. - Yours, etc,
BRIAN COSGROVE, Department of English, NUI, Maynooth, Co Kildare.