Fanny Hill
Frances "Fanny" Hill is a rich Englishwoman in her middle age, who leads a life of contentment with her loving husband Charles and their children. The novel consists of two long letters (which appear as volumes I and II of the original edition) addressed by Fanny to an unnamed acquaintance, who is only identified as ‘Madam.’ Fanny has been prevailed upon by the ‘Madam’ to recount the ’scandalous stages’ of her earlier life, which she proceeds to do with ‘stark naked truth’ as her governing principle.
Fanny’s account begins with the loss of her parents at the age of fourteen followed by a journey to London, and ends with her eventual union with Charles about five years later. The intermediate narrative is filled with an immense variety of sexual experiences, which are described with a clinical degree of vividness, whimsy, wit and humour. A rich store of imaginative metaphors and outlandish similies is brought to bear upon the sexual organs and actions of several participants, both male and female, in their various states of arousal and exertion (cf. the 'Excerpts' below). The plot has been described as ‘operatic’ by John Hollander, who opines that “the book’s language and its protagonist’s character are its greatest virtues.” 
The first letter begins with a short account of Fanny’s impoverished childhood in a village in Lancashire. She loses her parents to small-pox, arrives in London to look for domestic work, and gets lured into a brothel. She is a clandestine witness to two separate sexual encounters (one between an ugly older couple and another between a young pretty pair), and is a far from unwilling participant in a lesbian dalliance with a bisexual prostitute named Phoebe. Charles (who is a customer at the brothel) induces Fanny to make an escape, which she manages to do with her virginity intact. Soon thereafter, she loses it to Charles and becomes his lover. Charles is sent away by deception to the South Seas, and Fanny is driven by her desperation and destitution to become the kept woman of a rich merchant named Mr H—. After enjoying a brief period of stability, she espies Mr H— in casual congress with her own maid, and goes on to seduce Will (the young footman of Mr H—) as an act of calculated revenge. However, she is soon discovered by Mr H— in flagrante delicto with Will. After being abandoned by Mr H—, Fanny becomes a prostitute for wealthy and discerning clients in a pleasure-house run by Mrs Cole. This marks the end of the first letter.
The second letter begins with a rumination on the tedium of writing about sex and the difficulty of driving a middle course between vulgarity of language on the one hand, and `mincing metaphors and affected circumlocutions’ on the other. Fanny goes on to describe her adventures in the house of Mrs Cole, which include a public orgy, an elaborately orchestrated bogus sale of her ’virginity’ to an enervate rich dupe called Mr Norbert, and a sado-masochistic session with one Mr Barville involving mutual flagellation with birch-rods. These are interspersed with narratives which do not involve Fanny directly; for instance, three of her companion girls in the house (Emily, Louisa and Harriett) describe their own losses of virginity, and the nyphomaniac Louisa seduces the immensely endowed but imbecile ‘good-natured Dick’. The only scene in the novel involving male homosexuality occurs towards the end, when Fanny espies upon a scene of anal intercourse between two young boys. (This episode was expurgated from several later editions.) Eventually Fanny retires from prostitution and becomes the lover of a rich and worldly-wise man of sixty (described by Fanny as a ‘rational pleasurist’). This phase of Fanny’s life brings about her intellectual development, and leaves her prodigiously wealthy when her lover dies of a sudden cold. Shortly thereafter, she has a chance encounter with Charles, who has returned as a poor man to England after being shipwrecked. Fanny offers her fortune to Charles unconditionally, but he insists on marrying her.
The novel contains several sharply drawn characters, such as Charles, Mrs Jones (Fanny’s landlady), Mrs Cole, Will, Mr H— and Mr Norbert. The prose is richly textured and consists of long sinuous sentences containing a profusion of subordinate clauses. Its morality is conventional, in that it denounces sodomy, frowns upon vice and approves of only heterosexual unions based upon mutual love . However, there are sly hints in the concluding paragraphs of the book (“You laugh perhaps at this tail-piece of morality…”) which tend to cast doubt on the sincerity of these moral pronouncements.
pornographic