Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure

It’s nearly impossible to talk about the evolution and existence of the erotic genre without mentioning John Cleland’s Fanny Hill. Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, as it was originally penned, was published in two installments in 1748 and 1749 in the United Kingdom; the book was immediately censored and banned, and both the author and editor were imprisoned. Reason: the publication of a work of fiction depicting the life of a licentious woman and her sexuality in detail and in a manner that was unequivocally and intentionally obscene.

Fanny Hill’s prose is amusing, witty and occasionally reflective; it has the quality of pornography that is self-conscious, as if the book itself were a parody of the famous Moll Flanders that it resembles so much. When reading its abundant sex scenes with ever-changing scenarios, different characters and sexual practices that do not always end up to be gratifying for a Fanny who tries to find herself in the very heart of licentiousness, we acknowledge the enormous influence of this novel – not only in later books of erotica, but in almost every work of written and audiovisual pornography that we know today.