This image is the cover for the book Memoirs of Fanny Hill, Classics To Go

Memoirs of Fanny Hill, Classics To Go

Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure—popularly known as Fanny Hill (possibly an anglicisation of the Latin mons veneris, mound of Venus)—is an erotic novel by 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 "dirty words" or explicit scientific terms for body parts, but uses many literary devices to describe genitalia.

John Cleland

John Cleland, (born 1709—died Jan. 23, 1789, London), English novelist, author of the notorious Fanny Hill; or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. After serving as a consul at Smyrna and later as an agent of the British East India Company in Bombay, Cleland became a penniless wanderer who drifted from place to place and was apparently confined several times in English debtors’ prisons. In such reduced circumstances, he wrote Fanny Hill (1748–49) for a fee of 20 guineas. An elegant, flowery work of pornography describing the activities of a London prostitute, this novel has enjoyed enormous popularity for more than two centuries as a classic of erotic literature. When originally published, it was immediately suppressed (an action later repeated many times), and Cleland was called before the Privy Council. He pleaded his extreme poverty and was not sentenced. Instead, Lord Granville, thinking him talented, secured him a yearly pension of £100, that he might put his gifts to better use. Thereafter, he became a journalist, playwright, and amateur philologist.

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