Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure by Cleland, John; Terry, Richard; Williams, Helen;

Short description:

The only student edition of the most important erotic novel in English.

Long description:

John Cleland?s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure has been described as the first erotic novel in English and is perhaps the greatest example of the genre. From the outset it was mired in disrepute. Cleland penned the novel to liberate himself from debtors? prison, and the book?s manifestly lewd content led to its legal suppression within a year of publication. Though versions of the novel, nearly always abridged in some form, continued to find a way into print, the Memoirs remained an underground text until the 1960s. Only as that decade ushered in a culture less socially deferential and more sexually permissive was the moment opportune for the obscenity ban to be successfully challenged. Cleland?s novel is a triumph of literary style, resting on his invention of an entirely new, vividly metaphoric, terminology for describing sexual pleasure.

This Broadview Edition provides extensive materials on Cleland?s biography and career, contemporary censorship, and pornography and prostitution in the eighteenth century.

?A great new edition of this classic erotic novel, with a well-grounded introduction, a biography of its strange author, and abundant materials for studying sexuality and fiction in the long eighteenth century.? ? James Grantham Turner, University of California Berkeley

?In preparing the elegantly engraved 1766 edition of John Cleland?s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748), Broadview editors Richard Terry and Helen Williams have lived up to their cover art: an enigmatic, multivalent 1930 photograph of an androgynous nude. A busy introduction sprints from Cleland?s exhausting London life as a man of letters to his long stint with the East India Company to his notorious novel?s place vis-?-vis amatory fiction to its formal problems and the metaphorical devices Cleland invented to solve them. Engrossing footnotes reconstruct the material culture surrounding the novel, enumerating even the ingredients of sack-posset and the chemical composition of hartshorn. Supplementary excerpts from twenty-three contemporary texts foreground eighteenth-century sex, sex work, censorship of sex writing, that writing itself, and its biomedical counterpart (exemplified in Cleland?s own 1761 Institutes of Health).? ? Jayne Lewis, Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century

?Scholars and teachers of John Cleland?s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748? 49) can rejoice: there is now a quality teaching edition of this landmark text available from Broadview.? ? Bethany E. Qualls, University of California, Davis, Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts 1640?1830

Table of Contents:

List of illustrations

Acknowledgements

Introduction

John Cleland: A Brief Chronology

A Note on the Text

Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure

1. Warrants for the Detention of Cleland and Others (1749)


2. Statement of Ralph Griffiths Taken before Lovel Stanhope, Law Clerk (13 November 1749)


3. Letter from Cleland to Lovel Stanhope, Law Clerk (13 November 1749)


4. John Nichols, Obituary of Cleland (February 1789)


5. Ruling of Supreme Court Justice Arthur G. Klein (23 August 1963)

1. From The School of Venus (1680)


2. From Thomas Stretzer, A New Description of Merryland (1741)


3. From John Armstrong, The Oeconomy of Love (1745)


4. From the Trial of Francis Charteris for Rape (1730)


5. Trial of John Deacon and Thomas Blair for Sodomitical Practices (1743)


6. From Thomas Cannon, Ancient and Modern Pederasty Investigated and Exemplify?d (1749)

1. From Nicholas Venette, The Pleasures of Conjugal-Love Explain?d (1740?)


2. From William Cowper, The Anatomy of Humane Bodies (1737)


3. From La Mettrie, Man a Machine (1749)


4. From Cleland, Institutes of Health (1761)

1. From Cleland, The Case of the Unfortunate Bosavern Penlez (1749)


2. From Memoirs of the Celebrated Miss Fanny M? (1759)


3. From Genuine Memoirs of the Celebrated Miss Maria Brown (1766)


4. From Harris?s List of Covent Garden Ladies (1757?95)

1. Review of Tobias Smollett?s Peregrine Pickle, Monthly Review (March 1751)


2. Review of Henry Fielding?s Amelia, Monthly Review (December 1751)


3. From The Dictionary of Love (1753)


4. From Commentary on Historical and Physical Dissertation on the Case of Catherine Vizzani (1751)

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