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John Cleland · 1749
Cleland's 1748 novel — written, by his own account, to prove that erotic fiction could be composed without a single coarse word — is the earliest English prose pornography, and the strangeness it carries into Vela's reading is that a man wrote a young woman's sexual awakening as a story of education, told entirely in her voice.
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What this book knows
Fanny Hill maps the female body's awakening as both commerce and genuine feeling, revealing that erotic life shapes selfhood as surely as any education.
erotic-as-power
I was so afraid, without a precise notion of why, and what I had to fear, that I sat on the settee, trembling.
MFH-RC-019Steeled to the height by his stoutness in suffering, I continued the discipline, observing him wreathing his body in a way plainly not the effect of pain.
MFH-RC-160embodiment
My eyes, moistened with tears, seemed to reproach him with his cruelty, and ask him, if such were the rewards of love.
MFH-RC-044The sound and sight thrilled to the very soul of me, and made every vein of my body circulate liquid fires.
MFH-RC-026education-and-formation
I got into a circle of acquaintance that soon stripped me of all the remains of bashfulness and modesty left of my country education.
MFH-RC-071She was a severe enemy to the seduction of innocence, and confined her acquisitions solely to those unfortunate young women who, having lost it, deserved compassion.
MFH-RC-187Illuminates
Editor’s framing
The book is structured as Fanny's letters, recounting her passage from a country girl stripped of bashfulness into a woman who reads her own erotic life as the thing that formed her. The complication a modern reader cannot set aside is the authorship: this is a man's idea of a woman's pleasure and a woman's voice, written for men, in a frame — sex work narrated as cheerful self-improvement — that the period's economics made far less benign than the prose admits. Attend to the doubled register the card names: commerce and genuine feeling held in the same sentence, the body's awakening figured as an education that shapes selfhood as surely as any book. Vela reads it as a historical origin point for the literary erotica that later writers — Nin foremost — would reclaim and complicate from the inside, and we hold it with that critical distance rather than at face value.
Featured passage
Mr. H...., so experienced, so learned in the ways of women, numbers of whom had passed through his hands, doubtless, soon perceived this uneasiness, and, without approving, or liking me the better for it, had the complaisance to indulge me. He made suppers at my lodging, where he brought several companions of his pleasures, with their mistresses; and by this means I got into a circle of acquaintance, that soon stripped me of all the remains of bashfulness and modesty which might be yet left of my country education, and were, to a just taste, perhaps, the greatest of my charms. We visited one another in form, and mimicked, as near as we could, all the miseries, the follies, and impertinencies of the women in quality, in the round of which they trifle away their time, without it ever entering their little heads, that on earth there cannot subsist any thing more silly, more flat, more insipid and worthless, than, generally considered, their system of life is: they ought to treat the men as their tyrants, indeed! were they to condemn them to it. But though, amongst the kept mistresses (and I was now acquainted with a good many, besides some useful matrons, who live by their connexions with them), I hardly knew one that did not perfectly detest their keepers, and, of course, made little or no scruple of any infidelity they could safely accomplish, I had still no notion of wronging mine: for, besides that no mark of jealousy on his side started me the hint, or gave me the provocation to play him a trick of that sort, and that his constant generosity, politeness, and tender attention to please me, forced a regard to him, that, without affecting my heart, insured him my fidelity, no object had yet presented that could overcome the habitual liking I had contracted for him and I was on the eve of obtaining, from the movements of his own voluntary generosity, a modest provision for life, when an accident happened which broke all the measures he had resolved upon in my favour.
Mr. H...., so experienced, so learned in the ways of women, numbers of whom had passed through his hands, doubtless, soon perceived this uneasiness, and, withou…
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