Customer Reviews

Fanny Hill: Memoirs Of A Woman of Pleasure (Wordsworth Classics)

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A young country lass is abandoned in London without any money or supervision. Having come there with the intention of entering into service, she is instead unwittingly swept into prostitution because she is so lovely and there is a strong market for maidenhead. By dumb luck, Fanny manages to hold onto her virginity just long enough to give it to Charles, who remains the love of her life despite her subsequent dalliances. Fanny and Charles are separated against their will, and her life follows an increasingly lurid trajectory as she becomes more than one gentleman's kept woman, works in a brothel, picks up a john on the street, indulges various fetishes, witnesses a male homosexual encounter through a peep hole, and eventually inherits a sizeable fortune from an elderly gentleman with whom she consorted until his end of days. When she and Charles re-encounter each other, Fanny's new wealth enables them to be together, and so she ends respectably married and maternal after all.

The sex in this book is graphic. The descriptions of "engines" and "chinks" are overblown and hilarious. Fanny and her paramours certainly seem to enjoy themselves, and simultaneous orgasm is always achieved! There is never a violent or scary or even utterly abject moment, so a life of prostitution is quite romanticized here.

This edition has some typesetting issues toward the end of the book (dropped letters and mixed up spacing), and sometimes they did interfere with being able to read the text accurately.

The book is a quick read and funny. Fanny is a stereotypical prostitute with a heart of gold who is rewarded with middle class respectability. Not realistic, but definitely entertaining.

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.

Memoirs Of Fanny Hill has been called the first pornographic book and it is one of the most banned books ever.
I stumbled upon Memoirs Of Fanny Hill on my iTouch Classic Books app. Would I consider it a classic? I'd consider it classic porn, which is a genre I've never read.

The story is written in two parts. In the first part of the story we get to know Frances Hill and how she became a prostitute at a young age. She was born to a poor family in Liverpool. At age fifteen, both her parents died of smallpox. She was brought to London by a family friend and is abandoned there. Fanny is looking to work as a housemaid and stumbles unknowingly upon a whorehouse run by a Mrs. Brown who takes Fanny in and tells her her 'maidenhead' will fetch a good price.

Fanny continues to live the life of a prostitute, but as time passes, she becomes smarter. In the second half of the story we see a more experienced Fanny. By the end of the story, she is nineteen years old.

Throughout the book she recollects her many lovers and sexual encounters. There is plenty of sex in the plot. Same sex partners, light bondage and lashings, to a full-on orgy are all in the storyline. Voyeurism was a sort of past-time for a few of the characters in this story, they always seemed to find a peep-hole available. It's all very scandalous and shocking, especially considering this book was written in 1749. (way before my beloved Pride & Prejudice)

This was a spicy read, even by today's standards. I'm surprised that he wrote the story without any outright vile language.
I found the writing to be well done. John Cleland would definitely give some erotic fiction writers a run for their money. However, I did laugh at some of the word use. The author uses the funniest names while referring to the male form. The engine of love assaults, enormous machine, IT, staff of love and object of terror and delight, just to name a few.
He describes female pubic hair as the richest sable fur in the universe. I'm sorry, but I laughed out loud while reading that!

All in all, this was an unexpected read for me and I enjoyed it enough to keep reading. I finished it in two sittings. It was bawdy and scandalous and I did wonder what would become of Fanny.

I read that author John Cleland and the publishers and printer of Fanny Hill were arrested shortly after publication. The novel of course, continued to sell in pirated forms. Sex does sell, no matter what century we're in.

The few literary classics I have read that have been at one time or another viewed as pornography come across today, in the 21st Century, as anything but. With "Fanny Hill", however, not only does the pornography tag not surprise me, I am actually somewhat surprised that this book is NOT at the center of several attempts to have it banned and/or reclassified as pornography. Is it literature? Without a doubt, and author John Cleland's overly descriptive language and repeated attempts at describing the same sexual act in as many different ways as possible should forever earn him a spot in literary history. Yet at the same time it is undeniably graphic, and if the same language were printed in a Playboy magazine, it would probably earn some high erotic praise.
Fanny Hill is an orphaned teenager who moves to London to find a life for herself. She falls in with a madam, gets introduced to sex, gets (willingly)sold to men, engages in group sex, becomes a mistress, and generally leads a life seeped in sex. There is a lot of sex. For Cleland, however, sex is one of the highest and most beautiful acts one can enjoy in life, and his every word attests to this position. Although the novel is essentially nothing more than a series of set pieces in which Fanny Hill (and others) have sex in different ways, the writing transcends the repetitive nature of the action. The sex is not debauched or degrading (compare this to Zola's Nana) but is positive and life-affirming.
The label of "pornography" slapped on this novel for centuries is ultimately wrong, but some of the book's content, at least for the more conservative reader, is not that far removed from what some may call pornography. Cleland's intent seems to be to glorify the natural human process of lovemaking and his every lavish word and phrase attests to that. A controversial and provocative read, yes, but definitely very memorable and well-worth of the title "literature".

Considering all the handwringing over the "pornification" of our culture, it's surprising to me that there isn't more discussion of this, the biggest porno hit of 18th century britain. Make no mistake- this is one dirty book, but that doesn't exclude it from the canon. I quite enjoyed it, in the end.

This book is not only gives insight into an aspect of life in Britain in the 18th century but also manages to be highly entertaining, amusing and pornographic at the same time.
For anyone interested in the last aspect only The Power of Mesmerism and The Romance of Lust may be more the thing.

See my List "Victorian Erotica".