Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (Unabridged)
Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure by John Cleland - Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure-popularly known as Fanny Hill-is an erotic novel by the English novelist John Cleland first published in London in 1748. Written while the author was in debtors' prison in London, it is considered 'the first original English prose pornography, and the first pornography to use the form of the novel'. It is one of the most prosecuted and banned books in history.
The book exemplifies the use of euphemism. The text has no swearing or explicit scientific terms for body parts, but uses many literary devices to describe genitalia. For example, the vagina is sometimes referred to as 'the nethermouth', which is also an example of psychological displacement.
Plot
The novel consists of two long letters (which appear as volumes I and II of the original edition) written by Frances 'Fanny' Hill, a rich Englishwoman in her middle age, who leads a life of contentment with her loving husband Charles and their children, to an unnamed acquaintance identified only as 'Madam.' Fanny has been prevailed upon by 'Madam' to recount the 'scandalous stages' of her earlier life, which she proceeds to do with 'stark naked truth' as her governing principle.
The first letter begins with a short account of Fanny's impoverished childhood in a Lancashire village. At age 14, she loses her parents to smallpox, arrives in London to look for domestic work, and gets lured into a brothel. She sees a sexual encounter between an ugly older couple and another between a young attractive couple, and participates in a lesbian encounter with Phoebe, a bisexual prostitute. A customer, Charles, induces Fanny to escape. She loses her virginity to Charles and becomes his lover. Charles is sent away by deception to the South Seas, and Fanny is driven by desperation and poverty to become the kept woman of a rich merchant named Mr H-. After enjoying a brief period of stability, she sees Mr H- have a sexual encounter with her own maid, and goes on to seduce Will (the young footman of Mr H-) as an act of revenge. She is discovered by Mr H- as she is having a sexual encounter with Will. After being abandoned by Mr H-, Fanny becomes a prostitute for wealthy clients in a pleasure-house run by Mrs Cole. This marks the end of the first letter.
The second letter begins with a rumination on the tedium of writing about sex and the difficulty of driving a middle course between vulgar language and 'mincing metaphors and affected circumlocutions'. Fanny then describes her adventures in the house of Mrs Cole, which include a public orgy, an elaborately orchestrated bogus sale of her 'virginity' to a rich dupe called Mr Norbert, and a sado-masochistic session with a man involving mutual flagellation with birch-rods. These are interspersed with narratives which do not involve Fanny directly; for instance, three other girls in the house (Emily, Louisa and Harriett) describe their own losses of virginity, and the nymphomaniac Louisa seduces the immensely endowed but imbecilic 'good-natured Dick'.
John Cleland (Author), Mitchell Cuevas (Narrator)
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