SOURCE: "Fanny Hill," in John Cleland: Images of a Life, Columbia University Press, 1974, pp. 84-107.

In the following excerpt, Epstein discusses the possible sources for the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, including both classical and contemporary texts as well as Cleland's own experience with the social and ethical standards of mid-eighteenth-century England.

We return now to the Memoirs and its historical context, to a consideration of how Cleland's novel both retained and departed from the thematic, structural, and stylistic characteristics of the works of pornography which preceded it. Although the works of various classical and medieval authors—such as Juvenal, Ovid, Catullus, Petronius, Boccaccio—contain what might be called pornographic elements, books which seem to devote most of their energy to sexual arousal did not appear regularly in Europe until the middle of the seventeenth century, perhaps as part of what David Foxon terms a general European...