Audiobook · read by volunteers
Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure
John Cleland (1709–1789)
Read by Chip, Peter Yearsley, Kara Shallenberg (1969-2023), Annie Coleman Rothenberg, Denny Sayers (d. 2015), Gesine, Nocturna · 10 chapters · 9 h 27
About the book
Fanny Hill is a young country girl who arrives in London with little money and fewer prospects, and who is soon drawn into a world that her upbringing never prepared her for. Told in the form of two long letters, her memoirs are a picaresque account of her fortunes, her friends and her education in the ways of the city. John Cleland wrote them in the middle of the eighteenth century, and the book became one of the best-known banned novels in English, challenged by authorities for generations. The language is elaborate and elegant, avoiding crude words, and the narrator tells her story with humour and a surprising lack of shame. This reading is for adult listeners only. Seven LibriVox volunteers, among them Chip and Peter Yearsley, share the ten chapters over about nine and a half hours.
Introduction
John Cleland (1709-1789) was an English writer who wrote Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure in 1749 while he was in a London debtors' prison. It is often described as the first widely read English novel in the genre of erotica, and for that reason its history is one of repeated prosecution and bans, which makes it an important text in the long struggle against censorship of free expression.
Earlier heroines of such stories had conducted their love affairs offstage, and any misadventures were described in euphemisms. As women who had gone astray, they were expected to repent, which made the tales acceptable to a moralistic readership. Fanny is different: she tells her story in the first person, with remarkable candour. Cleland's style is ornate and indirect, and the book is as interesting for its prose and its picture of eighteenth-century London as for its subject.
The recording has 10 chapters and lasts about 9.5 hours, read by seven LibriVox volunteers. The content is adult in theme, and listeners should be aware of that.
Why listen now? Anyone interested in the history of the novel, of censorship or of sexuality in literature will find it a revealing document. It is a book that is often discussed more than read, and hearing it gives the chance to judge it first-hand. It is also worth remembering that the book was long known mainly through reputation and prosecution. Hearing it without the smirking atmosphere that often surrounds its name allows the listener to appreciate its structure, its irony and the way it reflects the social world of its century. Listeners should judge for themselves.
Public domain
John Cleland died in 1789: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text