Thursday, May 30, 2013

^ Fanny Hill: Memoirs Of A Woman of Pleasure (Wordsworth Classics)


Fanny Hill: Memoirs Of A Woman of Pleasure (Wordsworth Classics)


Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, better known as Fanny Hill, is one of the most notorious texts in English literature. As recently as 1963 an unexpurgated edition was the subject of a trial, yet in the eighteenth century John Cleland's open celebration of sexual enjoyment was


Laughing All the Way to Bed
Well, here it is - maybe the most famous dirty book in the history of the English language. And it's dirty, all right, but what it mostly is, is hilarious.

Mind you, in some respects "Fanny Hill" is quite a good book too. We'll get to the reasons for that in due course. Nevertheless, I found it difficult to get through more than a few pages without laughing. Why? Because the author can't seem to come right out and say what he means, but has to describe it in the most strained, outlandish metaphors.

John Cleland came up with this story back in the early Hanoverian period, twenty to thirty years before the American Revolution, so I can't say what variety of dirty words he may have had access to, but you won't believe the ways he has his narrator, Miss Hill, describe a man's "engine" without actually naming it. The same goes for the corresponding parts of a woman's body, of course, and the narrative tends to describe two people having sex in similarly...


Fanny Hill: Memoirs Of A Woman of Pleasure (Wordsworth Classics) is one of best selling in Classics category.


No comments:

Post a Comment