SOURCE: "Fanny Hill and the Comic Novel," in The Critical Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 3, Autumn 1971, pp. 263-75.

In the following essay, Bradbury argues that as an example of the era's experimentation in novelistic form, Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure may not be exceptionally good, but it does demonstrate the attempts of eighteenth-century novelists to combine powerful individual episodes into a unified lengthy narrative.

Though a few years back it had the status of a cause celebre and an outrage, John Cleland's The Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, better known as Fanny Hill, can only seem in today's climate a modestly pornographic book. Indeed the very category of pornography is a receding one; and students of generic classification who set some store by the category and see it as a useful way of defining an aesthetic procedure had better be on their mettle. As it happens, The...