THE mystery of what happened to Mrs Robinson after the end of The Graduate will be solved after 40 years thanks to the intervention of The Times.

Charles Webb published excerpts of his sequel, Home School, in the pages of this newspaper this month.

Mrs Robinson, the archetypal older woman immortalised on screen by Anne Bancroft, gave the world another tantalising glimpse of her seductive ways, but the end of the story was left untold.

Now Random House has bought the rights in a £30,000 deal after this newspaper put it in contact with Webb.

The 66-year-old American author and his mentally ill partner, a woman known as Fred, had been facing eviction from their flat in Hove, East Sussex.

Webb had fallen £2,000 in arrears with his rent and had debts totalling £30,000. He recently received a letter from his landlord threatening eviction, and Brighton & Hove City Council issued a summons for non-payment of council tax.

The deal means that he can pay off his debts. In addition, a wellwisher has responded to Webb’s appeal in The Times for temporary accommodation while he negotiates with his creditors and looks after Fred.

Although the film adaptation of The Graduate made £60 million at the box office, Webb is not rich.

He received only £14,000 for the film, and gave much of his money to charity over the years. He assigned the royalties for The Graduate to the Anti-Defamation League and declined his father’s inheritance.

He has always valued artistic integrity over money. He was initially reluctant to negotiate a publishing deal because he was afraid that Canal Plus, the French media company that owns the exploitation rights to The Graduate, would be able to make a film of the sequel without his permission.

A clause in his contract meant that he had surrendered the film rights to any sequels. But last month he received word from a lawyer that under French copyright law he might be able to retrieve the rights. Webb could not continue legal negotiations because he was broke.

The book deal has allowed Webb to pay off most of his debts and pay his French lawyer to find out whether he has a realistic chance of retrieving the film rights.

“My first official act after depositing the cheque was to send off the amount owed to the French law firm,” he said. “I told them as soon as the funds were in their account I hoped they would give me a frank assessment of the chances of recovering the rights.”

Home School is to be published in Britain in June next year. Random House will negotiate the sale of foreign rights for the book, including an American edition.

Webb is rewriting the ending of the book to give Mrs Robinson a last hurrah. “I would never kill her off,” he said, adding cryptically: “But you will be seeing the back of her.”