Fanny Hill: Or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure

by John Cleland, Chelsea G. Summers (Other), Jessica Stoya (Other)

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. 

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

265 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 6, 2026

About the author

John Cleland (1709 – 1789) was an English novelist, most famous—and infamous—as the author of the erotic novel Fanny Hill: or, the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure.

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; he was also 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.

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 dying father. Upon William's death, the estate went to Lucy for administration. She, in turn, did not choose to support John.