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                 FANNY HILL

        MEMOIRS OF A WOMAN OF PLEASURE

                    c 1749

               by John Cleland

Letter The First

     Madam,

     I sit down to give you an undeniable proof of my con-
sidering your desires as indispensable orders.  Ungracious
then as the task may be, I shall recall to view those scan-
dalous stages of my life, out of which I emerg'd, at length,
to the enjoyment of every blessing in the power of love,
health, and fortune to bestow; whilst yet in the flower of
youth, and not too late to employ the leisure afforded me by
great ease and affluence, to cultivate an understanding,
naturally not a despicable one, and which had, even amidst
the whirl of loose pleasures I had been tost in, exerted 
more observation on the characters and manners of the world
than what is common to those of my unhappy profession, who
looking on all thought or reflection as their capital enemy,
keep it at as great a distance as they can, or destroy it
without mercy.

     Hating, as I mortally do, all long unnecessary preface,
I shall give you good quarter in this, and use no farther
apology, than to prepare you for seeing the loose part of my
life, wrote with the same liberty that I led it.

     Truth! stark, naked truth, is the word; and I will not
so much as take the pains to bestow the strip of a gauze
wrapper on it, but paint situations such as they actually
rose to me in nature, careless of violating those laws of
decency that were never made for such unreserved intimacies
as ours; and you have too much sense, too much knowledge of
the ORIGINALS themselves, to sniff prudishly and out of
character at the PICTURES of them.  The greatest men, those
of the first and most leading taste, will not scruple adorning
their private closets with nudities, though, in compliance
with vulgar prejudices, they may not think them decent deco-
rations of the staircase, or salon.

     This, and enough, premised, I go souse into my personal
history.  My maiden name was Frances Hill.  I was born at a
small village near Liverpool, in Lancashire, of parents ex-
tremely poor, and, I piously believe, extremely honest.

     My father, who had received a maim on his limbs that
disabled him from following the more laborious branches of
country-drudgery, got, by making of nets, a scanty subsis-
tence, which was not much enlarg'd by my mother's keeping
a little day-school for the girls in her neighbourhood.
They had had several children; but none lived to any age
except myself, who had received from nature a constitution
perfectly healthy.

     My education, till past fourteen, was no better than
very vulgar; reading, or rather spelling, an illegible
scrawl, and a little ordinary plain work composed the whole
system of it; and then all my foundation in virtue was no
other than a total ignorance of vice, and the shy timidity
general to our sex, in the tender stage of life when objects
alarm or frighten more by their novelty than anything else.
But then, this is a fear too often cured at the expence of
innocence, when Miss, by degrees, begins no longer to look
on a man as a creature of prey that will eat her.

     My poor mother had divided her time so entirely be-
tween her scholars and her little domestic cares, that she
had spared very little of it to my instruction, having,
from her own innocence from all ill, no hint or thought of 
guarding me against any.

     I was now entering on my fifteenth year, when the 
worst of ills befell me in the loss of my tender fond par-
ents, who were both carried off by the small-pox, within a
few days of each other; my father dying first, and thereby
hastening the death of my mother; so that I was now left an
unhappy friendless orphan (for my father's coming to settle
there was accidental, he being originally a Kentishman).  
That cruel distemper which had proved so fatal to them, had
indeed seized me, but with such mild and favourable symptoms,
that I was presently out of danger, and, what I then did not
know the value of, was entirely unmark'd.  I skip over here
an account of the natural grief and affliction which I felt 
on this melancholy occasion.  A little time, and the giddi-