John Cleland's sexy classic -- available now after centuries under ban. Delightful, steamy, and enduring. (Jacketless library hardcover.)

John Cleland is among the most scandalous figures in British literary history, both celebrated and attacked as a pioneer of pornographic writing in English. His first novel, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, or Fanny Hill, is one of the enduring literary creations of the eighteenth century, despite over two hundred years of legal prohibition. Yet the full range of his work is still too little known. In this study, Hal Gladfelder combines groundbreaking archival research into Cleland’s tumultuous life with incisive readings of his sometimes extravagant, sometimes perverse body of work, positioning him as a central figure in the development of the novel and in the construction of modern notions of authorial and sexual identity in eighteenth-century England. Rather than a traditional biography, Fanny Hill in Bombay presents a case history of a renegade authorial persona, based on published works, letters, private notes, and newly discovered legal testimony. It retraces Cleland’s career from his years as a young colonial striver with the East India Company in Bombay through periods of imprisonment for debt and of estrangement from collaborators and family, shedding light on his paradoxical status as literary insider and social outcast. As novelist, critic, journalist, and translator, Cleland engaged with the most challenging intellectual currents of his era yet at the same time was vilified as a pornographer, atheist, and sodomite. Reconnecting Cleland’s writing to its literary and social milieu, this study offers new insights into the history of authorship and the literary marketplace and contributes to contemporary debates on pornography, censorship, the history of sexuality, and the contested role of literature in eighteenth-century culture.

CSF Publishing's Classic Erotica Collection includes title's carefully updated and corrected from the original text, and features new enhancements such as the author's biography and bibliography, and illustrations. ABOUT THE BOOK: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, or Fanny Hill is an erotic novel by John Cleland first published in England in 1748. Written while the author was in debtor's prison in London, it is considered "the first original English prose pornography, and the first pornography to use the form of the novel." One of the most prosecuted and banned books in history, it has become a synonym for obscenity. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: John Cleland (baptised 24 September 1709 - 23 January 1789) was an English novelist most famous and infamous as the author of Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, or Fanny Hill.

Fanny Hill: or, the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1749) is an erotic novel and early work of pornography by English author John Cleland. Written while Cleland was in prison, the novel was both successful and controversial, banned from publication but widely distributed in pirated and heavily edited copies. Fanny Hill: or, the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure was the subject of numerous court cases, including a prominent United States Supreme Court decision in 1966 which found that the book did not violate obscenity laws. Using extensive euphemism, Cleland's novel is the story of Frances "Fanny" Hill. Narrated in two letters to a friend known only as "Madam," the book traces Fanny's early life as an orphan-turned-prostitute. After the death of her parents from smallpox, Fanny moves from Lancashire to London to work at a brothel, where she witnesses and participates in numerous sexual acts with women and men of all ages. When her lover Charles is sent abroad, Fanny becomes the mistress of a wealthy merchant who later abandons her. While earning a living working for wealthy clients in a high-end brothel, Fanny witnesses wilder and increasingly dangerous sexual encounters, eventually retiring to a life as the lover of an older intellectual. Recognized as an early and controversial pornographic novel, Fanny Hill: or, the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure is important for its groundbreaking depictions of queer sex and fetish and continues to be read and studied to this day. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of John Cleland's Fanny Hill: or, the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure is a classic of pornographic and erotic literature reimagined for modern readers.

Fanny Hill, also known as Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, has been a notorious novel since it first appeared in London in 1748-9. Banned for its "obscene" content, this fictional account of a young woman's unconventional route to middle-class respectability is a lively and engaging tale of a heroine who falls into prostitution, passes through the boudoirs and brothels of England, and eventually rises to respectability. Fanny Hill's story offers modern readers sensuality and substance, as well as an unusually frank depiction of love and sex in the eighteenth century.