This study examines metafictional narrative techniques of John Fowles`s The French Lieutenant`s Woman to explore the nature of historical imagination with which Fowles reconstructs the Victorian age. In this novel Fowles is concerned with challenging the conventional notions of the Victorian age, such as respectability and sexual purity, which were propagated by the representatives of the middle class. Then the question remains whether the picture of the Victorian age in the novel is tree from the author`s personal beliefs and class positioning and in what way the metafictional techniques function in the representation of the past. The authorial narrator emphasizes the autonomy of characters and the fictionality of his work in an attempt to expose and subvert the conventions of the 19th-century novels. Yet his idea is not sufficiently enacted in the novel: the narrator quite selectively exercises his omniscience, and his insistence on the fictionality of his work rather bespeaks his oversimplification of the Victorian novels. He makes numerous citations from historical, scientific and literary texts, and blends the past and the contemporary in an arbitrary and anachronistic way. In short, his metafictional techniques turn out to be the means of appropriating and reconstructing the past from the viewpoint of the present. The characterization of the protagonists also indicates the way Fowles appropriates numerous thinkers and scientists for his own purpose and writes his own version of the 19th-century intellectual history. The representation of a past may be derived from the desire to discover a meaningful pattern from the past, but historical representations are, as this novel shows, necessarily distortions of a past. This contradiction seems to be in the heart of Fowles`s historical imagination.