SOURCE: "The Old Last Act: Some Observations on Fanny Hill," in Encounter, Vol. XXI, No. 4, October 1963, pp. 69-77.

In the following essay, Hollander asserts that Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure or Fanny Hill observes the conventions necessary to a successful pornographic work and presents an appealing, literary evocation of its central character.

Literary realism ends with pornography. Far from being the limiting border towards which the realistic novel has always moved, pornography, the true pornography which seeks to excite and succeeds in so doing, is closer to poetry than it is to prose fiction. It is, willy-nilly, hopelessly caught up in conventions, for example. Rather than being pragmatic and original, it depends upon an iconography of detail, conventionalisations of erotic elements, and a limited world of concern—pornography can never stray too far from its moorings, nor can it seek in a philosophical way for ultimate constituents...