Name: Fanny Hill, Or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure
Rating: 2.7 (10 reviews)
ISBN: 9780375758089

John Cleland

The story of a country orphan's initiation into the urban world of prostitution offers a frank portrait of sexual awakening of a young girl and the society around her.

Fanny Hill, Or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure

Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, commonly known as Fanny Hill, has been shrouded in mystery and controversy since John Cleland completed it in 1749. The Bishop of London called the work 'an open insult upon Religion and good manners' and James Boswell referred to it as 'a most licentious and inflaming book'. The story of a prostitute's rise to respectability, it has been recognized more recently as a unique combination of parody, sensual entertainment and a philosophical concept of sexuality borrowed from French libertine novels. Modern readers will appreciate it not only as an important contribution to revolutionary thought in the Age of Enlightenment, but also as a thoroughly entertaining and important work of erotic fiction, deserving of a place in the history of the English novel beside Richardson, Fielding and Smollett.

Joshua Line

Rose Stanley

Pure ye olde worde porne.

Also, I disapprove of Cleland's
a) romanticising rape
b) demonising homosexuality

Quite an engaging narrator, but Moll Flanders is a much better example of how this sort of thing should be done...

Fanny Hill, Or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure

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