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A review by poutineriot
Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure by John Cleland
3.0
I can scarcely describe my incredible joy of discovering upon re-reading this smutty classic that yes, even as far back as the mid eighteenth century, if not longer still than that, aspiring authors were already writing poorly in run on sentences with grammar that was dubious at best about that so very feral, nuanced, fraught, and ofttimes sublime of the great human pleasures, which is to say, with no further recourse of preamble nor context, but to get straightaway to the point at hand, bonin'.
Plot: parents die, girl moves to city, nearly prostituted, escapes with her one true love (who she's spent all of five minutes with), out of nowhere he's shipped off by his father, she engages in survival sex work with a series of gross men, most of whom fortunately die, eventually makes it her profession, then by chance runs into her one true love again and the story ends with a plea for virtue. Also all of this happens when the narrator is between 15 and 18. To say that this novel has not aged well understates the point considerably.
Plot: parents die, girl moves to city, nearly prostituted, escapes with her one true love (who she's spent all of five minutes with), out of nowhere he's shipped off by his father, she engages in survival sex work with a series of gross men, most of whom fortunately die, eventually makes it her profession, then by chance runs into her one true love again and the story ends with a plea for virtue. Also all of this happens when the narrator is between 15 and 18. To say that this novel has not aged well understates the point considerably.