Fanny Hill: Or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure

As part of the Smith & Taylor Classics collection, this edition preserves Fanny Hill in its full provocative force, complete with new critical commentary.

Banned from publication in the United States until 1966 for its assumed obscenity, immorality, and lack of literary merit, Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1749), is a novel considered to be the first original English prose erotica.

This is the tale of the titular Fanny Hill, told to us in her own letters with ＂stark naked truth.＂ Young, orphaned, and naïve, she recounts her early days of prostitution in bawdy eighteenth-century London and her dramatic rise to respectability.

An important work of political, social, and sexual parody and philosophy, the author himself was imprisoned at the time of publication for his depictions of sexual ＂deviance＂ as an act of pleasure rather than simply shameful. Fanny Hill deserves its place in continued publication not only for its role in securing rights for erotica, but for its surprisingly modern, explicit, and complicated depictions of sex, love-making, money-talk, and homosexuality.

This uncensored version is set from the 1749 edition and includes a new introduction by Chelsea G. Summers, as well as a conversational afterword between Summers and Jessica Stoya.

Featuring a conversational afterword from writers Chelsea G. Summers and Jessica Stoya.

Celebrate Banned Book Day at libraries across the United States August 4th!

John Cleland (1709-1789) was an English novelist known for The Dictionary of Love (1753), The Woman of Honour (1768), and most famously his fictional Fanny Hill: or, the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1749) whose eroticism led to his arrest. James Boswell called him ＂a sly, old malcontent.＂

Chelsea G. Summers is a former academic and college professor with Ph.D. training in eighteenth-century British literature. A freelance writer, Chelsea’s work has appeared in New York Magazine, Vogue, The New Republic, Racked, The Guardian, and other fine publications. She splits her time between New York and Stockholm, Sweden. A Certain Hunger was her first novel.

Jessica Stoya has been a pornographer since 2006 and a writer since 2012. She has written for the New York Times, the Guardian, Playboy, and others. She has acted in Serbian sci-fi feature Ederlezi Rising and two of Dean Haspiel’s plays in Brooklyn and Manhattan. She lives in Los Angeles.