Fanny Hill

The novel consists of two long letters (which appear as volumes I and II of the original edition) by Frances "Fanny" Hill, a rich Englishwoman in her middle age, who leads a life of contentment with her loving husband Charles and their children, from Fanny to an unnamed acquaintance, identified only as 'Madam.' Fanny has been prevailed upon by 'Madam' to recount the 'scandalous stages' of her earlier life, which she proceeds to do with 'stark naked truth' as her governing principle. The first letter begins with a short account of Fanny's impoverished childhood in a village in Lancashire. At age 14 she loses her parents to smallpox, arrives in London to look for domestic work, and gets lured into a brothel. She sees a sexual encounter between an ugly older couple and another between a young attractive couple, and participates in a lesbian encounter with Phoebe, a bisexual prostitute. A customer, Charles, induces Fanny to escape. She loses her virginity to Charles and becomes his lover. Charles is sent away by deception to the South Seas, and Fanny is driven by desperation and poverty to become the kept woman of a rich merchant named Mr H-. After enjoying a brief period of stability, she sees Mr H- have a sexual encounter with her own maid, and goes on to seduce Will (the young footman of Mr H-) as an act of revenge. She is discovered by Mr H- as she is having a sexual encounter with Will. After being abandoned by Mr H-, Fanny becomes a prostitute for wealthy clients in a pleasure-house run by Mrs Cole. This marks the end of the first letter. John Cleland (baptised September 24, 1709 - January 23, 1789) was an English novelist most famous and infamous as the author of Fanny Hill: or, the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. John Cleland was the oldest son of William Cleland (1673/4 - 1741) and Lucy Cleland. He was born in Kingston upon Thames in Surrey but grew up in London, where his father was first an officer in the British Army and then a civil servant. William Cleland was a friend to Alexander Pope, and Lucy Cleland was a friend or acquaintance of both Pope, Viscount Bolingbroke, Chesterfield, and Horace Walpole. The family possessed good finances and moved among the finest literary and artistic circles of London. John Cleland entered Westminster School in 1721, but he left or was expelled in 1723. His departure was not for financial reasons, but whatever misbehavior or allegation had led to his departure is unknown. Historian J. H. Plumb speculates that Cleland's puckish and quarrelsome nature was to blame, but, whatever caused Cleland to leave, he entered the British East India Company after leaving school. He began as a soldier and worked his way up into the civil service of the company and lived in Bombay from 1728 to 1740. He returned to London when recalled by his father, who was dying. Upon William's death, the estate went to Lucy for administration. She, in turn, did not choose to support John (and Cleland's two brothers had finished at Westminster and gone on to support themselves).