Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure by John Cleland (1748)

I like to list the first time the book has been published, so I know that I have been reading a classic and at least what century or decade it has been from, though of course most of my reading is current. I read the 1963 Putnam edition with an introduction by Peter Quennell with the cover pictured here. I found this book in a collection I was processing and realized that I had heard of Fanny Hill, but had no real idea what that referred to, other than she was a spunky woman of the past. From the introduction: "Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure is the product of a luxurious and licentious, but not a commercially degraded era.... For all its abounding improprieties, his priapic novel is not a vulgar book."  There is also a note on the American history of the book, as it was one of the suppressed books of its time. I liked the aspect that names and dates of editions were not printed on the various versions printed in the U.S. and though many shabbily printed copies have been found, there were also nice limited or collectors editions printed for subscribers only, and were found in Ben Franklin's library and that of other well known men. The last thing I'd like to note from the introductions is that since Cleland lived in India for a while before he wrote this book (for 20 guineas), he would have learned that the Indian gods "would have stressed-the supreme delights of sex in all its forms."

I wanted to learn more about this books, so good old Wikipedia explains how well Cleland used euphemisms and that the book actually doesn't contain any dirty words or actual names of body parts. And then, it turns out I was reading the first official edition printed in the U.S. (In the book it claims all rights reserved, but the text is so old, it is in the public domain, so....) The book was banned in Massachusetts, but the publisher took it to the courts and the Supreme Court ruled that "Fanny Hill did not meet the Roth standard for obscenity." Wow.

The story itself is as if written by Fanny herself to some Madam in the form of two long letters, where she will explain her early scandalous life. She grows up in the country, but heads to London at 14, after losing both her parents. She is pulled into a brothel, but Charles helps her escape and loses her virginity to him instead of some highest bidder. But then Charles gets sent off to sea. She becomes the mistress of Mr. H. and when that falls apart, takes on high end clients, finally ending up with an elder gentleman. when he dies, she is left with his fortune and ends up living a respectable life as wife and mother. But before that she has plenty of adventures that are described in a witty way that was fun to read, even if at times the long winded older form of the language did bog down a bit. I enjoyed the descriptions of the times, customs and fashions.

It has been fund to do minor research on this and I might look up Erica Jong's version of this story too.