A review by apechild
Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure by John Cleland

3.0

Yeah... I feel that I need to read more classics, and to take something completely different for a break in my current Bronte binge, I picked up this book. It's basically porn from the 1700s. As they write in the introduction, you'll be disappointed if you're looking for four lettered words, but otherwise it is very graphic in the flowery detailed sense. It hops from sex scene to sex scene with such descriptions it gets to the point of phallus worship, and just gets a bit repetitive and dull at times. On the one hand, to read about women actively taking part in and enjoying sex is something I hadn't quite expected from the attitudes of the time. But it's pleasure from a man's point of view, that these girls are insaisable nymphomaniacs, never are not-in-the-mood, always want it whenever and with whoever and some aspects of real life don't seem to happen. This is the merry-go-land where STDs don't happen, women don't have periods to get in the way, despite all the sex there's only one pregnancy mentioned, prostitutes never get beaten up or have to take several clients a night or walk the street looking for them... and however liberating you may think this seems, they are merely sex objects and playthings, and they are being paid for this. It's how they put food on their table. Although in Cleland's world they're so sex mad the money is incidental.

Yes, yes, yes, it's a farce and I'm taking it all too seriously.

So Fanny shags her way through a variety of men and is a kept woman. Initially turning up to London as a naive teenager and recently orphaned, she is taken on as a 'maid' by Mrs Brown, at her house of trade, where Phoebe breaks Fanny in the first night. She eventually sneaks out to be the live in lover of Charles, before his father sends him off to the South Seas or whereever it is he went. She then hops through some other men who keep her; one throwing her out when she is unfaithful, another dying after a drinking binge in Bath, then finds her way to Mrs Coles, another madam who is actually nice. There she hangs out with three other working girls, has a lot of mad sex before eventually being reuinted with her one true love, Charles.

Now, I know it's a child of its time, and the law and attitudes were different things to what they are today but somethings make for uncomfortable reading. Thirteen year olds having sex which is near to rape (but told in a jolly way because they want it really) (and I think back then you had to be 14 to get married); Fanny's disgust at homosexuals; or the particularly disturbing seduction of a village idiot by Fanny and one of the other girls at Mrs Coles' house.

I'm just left a bit... well, partly bored, partly eyebrows raised, and goodness, the illustrations. If the writing gets a bit flowery and makes you wonder, 'did he really mean that...', then the illustrations leave you in no doubt.