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Fanny Hill: or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (Modern Library Classics), by John Cleland
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Fanny Hill, shrouded in controversy for most of its more than 250-year life, and banned from publication in the United States until 1966, was once considered immoral and without literary merit, even earning its author a jail sentence for obscenity.
The tale of a na�ve young prostitute in bawdy eighteenth-century London who slowly rises to respectability, the novel–and its popularity–endured many bannings and critics, and today Fanny Hill is considered an important piece of political parody and sexual philosophy on par with French libertine novels.
This uncensored version is set from the 1749 edition and includes commentary by Charles Rembar, the lawyer who defended the novel in the 1966 U.S. Supreme Court case, and newly commissioned notes.
- Sales Rank: #871732 in eBooks
- Published on: 2012-08-15
- Released on: 2012-08-15
- Format: Kindle eBook
Most helpful customer reviews
61 of 64 people found the following review helpful.
Lascivious! Unbelievable! An Erotic Literary Classic
By mp
I once reviewed Matthew Lewis' 1796 novel "The Monk" and said that it should be rated "R". Well, having just had the experience (and it is an experience) of reading John Cleland's 1748-9 novel, "Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure," everything else just seems like children's literature. Cleland's "Memoirs" was simultaneously reviled and a best seller, declared obscene and yet continued to be published illegally througout the 18th century. In the aftermath of the public frenzy for and against Samuel Richardson's ultra-famous novels "Pamela" and "Clarissa" and Henry Fielding's equally famous responses, "Shamela," "Joseph Andrews," and "Tom Jones," Cleland's novel strikes out into wholly uncharted moral and aesthetic territory.
Similarly to Defoe's "Moll Flanders," Cleland's novel begins with its heroine, Fanny Hill, an innocent, uneducated country girl, thrown at a very early age into the cruel world of London and forced into a life of prostitution. As an innocent virgin, the madam whose house she live in is saving Fanny for a noble customer whom they expect daily, but learns about sexual commerce by watching other prostitutes in the house. Eloping with a beautiful, wealthy young man named Charles before she engages in any sexual activity, the novel concerns Fanny's sexual awakenings and her life with and without her first love, Charles. The way that the novel refigures fidelity in the relationship between Fanny and Charles is astounding.
Cleland's master-stroke, if you will, linguistically, is to write a whole-heartedly pornographic novel and couch everything in such a rich variety of metaphors. Graphic scenarios can be found on almost every page, but there is a marked and remarkable absence of graphic language. Structurally, Cleland's plotting of Fanny Hill's escapades is exquisitely balanced and even-handed. Morally and aesthetically, "Memoirs" comes straight out of the strain of 18th century moral philosophy associated by turns, with Shaftesbury and David Hume. From Shaftesbury, Cleland takes the idea that aesthetics and morality should be judged on an equal form in works of art. From Hume, he takes the radical stance that vices and luxuries are not inherently evil, and even acceptable when not carried to extremes. Cleland makes judicious use of these structural and philosophical elements in creating one of the strongest and most liberated heroines in English literature.
Among other points of interest in the novel, there is the prevalence and even propriety of expressions of feminine desire, agency, power, and control over self and circumstances. Aside from her first entrance into London and her various periods as a kept-mistress, Fanny Hill is educated by the prostitute Phoebe, and the procuress Mrs. Cole to be an independent, self-regulating subject. Related to this is the rather revolutionary notion inferred that sexual education predicates all other sources of knowledge, and is at heart, the basis and foundation of human interaction, at least in the semi-utopic world of the novel.
There are so many fascinating things about Cleland's "Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure," it would take forever to puzzle through them all. All the same, I've only been able myself to think critically about the novel at some distance of remove from reading it. Reading this novel was an interesting, but frustrating, and at times impossible task. It's not a difficult novel to read in terms of prose, but for a 188 page novel, it tends to overwhelm everything else while you're reading it. Like I said, reading "Memoirs" is an experience - I often had to look at the cover to recall that this is no simple work of pornography, but an acknowledged work of classic literature. By all accounts, a captivating novel. It gets five stars just because it is so amazing and outlandish. Aside from the Marquis de Sade, who belongs properly to the excesses of the Romantic Era, I had no idea that there was anything even remotely like this in the 18th century. To quote that immortal philospher, Stephon Marbury, Cleland's novel is "all nude...but tastefully done."
22 of 23 people found the following review helpful.
a classic...come on now
By A Customer
The wellspring of all erotic fiction. How can anyone give less then 5 stars to a classic of its stature...especially such a classic with so many naughty bits. Of course it was written by a man...geez guys look at the first author on the list. Ok ok so maybe the 5th time you hear Fanny rapsodize about "from his prodigious size I feared he would rip me asunder" it starts to get a bit old (or maybe not for some), but on the other hand, this is the erotica everyone grew up on before the days of xrated magazines. Just think...a naughty book your grandmother couldn't disaprove of...she probably read it too.
20 of 21 people found the following review helpful.
Laughing All the Way to Bed
By benshlomo
Well, here it is - maybe the most famous dirty book in the history of the English language. And it's dirty, all right, but what it mostly is, is hilarious.
Mind you, in some respects "Fanny Hill" is quite a good book too. We'll get to the reasons for that in due course. Nevertheless, I found it difficult to get through more than a few pages without laughing. Why? Because the author can't seem to come right out and say what he means, but has to describe it in the most strained, outlandish metaphors.
John Cleland came up with this story back in the early Hanoverian period, twenty to thirty years before the American Revolution, so I can't say what variety of dirty words he may have had access to, but you won't believe the ways he has his narrator, Miss Hill, describe a man's "engine" without actually naming it. The same goes for the corresponding parts of a woman's body, of course, and the narrative tends to describe two people having sex in similarly mechanistic terms.
Which is all very well - we're talking about the tale of a woman who makes her living by this mechanical process, after all. However, the metaphorical approach is not only funny in itself, it also adds a surprising layer of romantic detachment to the whole business. Yes, you get this poetic, romantic language in the middle of some of the raunchiest physical activity in existence, and the result is just plain hysterical. Eventually, Miss Fanny Hill sees a young man's white skin beneath his pubic hair and compares it to a sunrise peeking through the silhouettes of the forest trees. That was about it for me.
For all I know, John Cleland's contemporaries might have read these comparisons and thought them perfectly reasonable, but a sunrise through the trees? Really, now.
Also amusing, though less frivolous, is Cleland's description of sex from a woman's point of view. In this day and age his notion of what pleases a woman strikes one as uninformed, to put it charitably. Another reviewer has already pointed out that Miss Hill and her colleagues seem quite taken with a man's size, and evidently believe that simultaneous orgasm is not only desirable, but common. And so on and so forth. I don't think I need to go into much more detail, since Miss Hill is more than happy to do that for you, but you get the point.
All of this is bizarre enough, at least to the twenty-first-century mind. So are various other details of the story, such as Miss Hill's respective attitudes toward male and female homosexuality. Like most of her contemporaries, Miss Hill looks upon the first as despicable and the second as no big deal. On the other hand, I admit I was mildly surprised that Cleland included those sexual expressions in the first place. The same can be said for his inclusion of bondage and discipline, which his narrator seems to look upon as an object of pity at worst, a chance for adventure at best. For an author of his time, Cleland strikes one as probably about as enlightened as one could expect.
Which brings us to the virtues of "Fanny Hill". For one thing, the narrator's attitude toward men is very subtle and neither submissive nor contemptuous in the least. She finds the male obsession with virginity amusing, but appreciates both male courtliness and male forcefulness when they appear at the appropriate moments. Her opinion of men is a rather sweet combination of nonplussed head-shaking and appreciation, and her opinion of women is pretty much the same. Her body is for sale, but her mind is not. Excellent.
With the exceptions already mentioned and a few others, this book seems fairly easygoing about the idea of sex for hire. It's abundantly clear that without such an outlet, Fanny would very quickly starve. She is fortunate enough in the long run to find a procuress who acts like a professional, screens the clients carefully, and looks after the welfare of her girls, but she also meets enough mercenary monsters to show that good people in the profession are rare. With the safety net provided by her friends, however, it's clear from this narrative that there are far worse fates for a young girl than being a prostitute.
Without giving too much away (and who really cares about the plot arc in "Fanny Hill" anyway?), this novel is also refreshing in that it does not punish Fanny for her misdeeds by consigning her to perdition. You learn at the beginning that she eventually finds a loving husband, as do several of her friends, but in the meantime enjoys her work. Movies like "Halloween," in which sexually active girls die, are more puritanical than this, for goodness' sake.
Most gratifying of all, not to say astonishing, is the fact that "Fanny Hill" is actually a rather philosophical novel. Fanny finds the love of her life a very few pages in, loses him by a series of mischances, and in her profession thereafter she learns just what love is. She discovers that sex is good in itself, but by itself cannot compare with sex when one loves one's partner. Given this, she's neither more nor less likely to find happiness than any other woman of her day.
John Cleland was not the first writer to take such a humanist approach to sexuality, but he was one of the earliest English authors to approach sex without guilt. No wonder the clergy got on his case. And those mechanical metaphors may be ridiculous, but upon reflection, it's probably better to include a little poetry with sex, however clunky. Like Miss Hill says, sex by itself is good, but sex with love is better, in bed or on paper.
Benshlomo says, Relax and enjoy yourself until your true love comes along.
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