My Thoughts on "Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure" by John Cleland as Published by Book of the Month Club (1992).

This book was first published in 1749! The publication of it I read (shown) was published for the Quality Paperback Book Club in 1992 by Book of the Month Club, Inc. If by the title you are thinking something along the lines of Memoirs of a Geisha what a shock you will be in for. Although, this perhaps could be an analog to a memoir of the geisha's sister who unlike her was not sent to a geisha house but sent to a prostitution house because she was not quite as pretty as the sister selected for the geisha house.

While there are points in Memoirs of a Geisha which are regarding sex the larger story and focus is not on that and certainly not as graphically as it is done here. 1749! Obviously this came before the more reserved Victorian Era! This was even more astoundingly graphic compared to up this point the most graphic classic I read which was Lady Chatterley's Lover by DH Lawrence which was first published in 1929. In the book Little Women one of the daughters was a writer and dipped her toes into writing romance or something I can hardly believe her's came close to this! I also previously read Lolita by Nabokov. . . not even close to this. That one I think people who have not read it think it is more graphic than it is. Anyway, this book is about 270 pages and the publishers get extra points for actually starting page 1 on page 1! However, it's a quick read as the print is pretty big compared to other books. I read it in just 4 days.

It has a lot of parallels with Memoirs of a Geisha in how girls end up in such situations. This book is sometimes known as "Fanny Hill" who is the girl in question. The book covers her life from when she was 15-19 years old. It is written in just 2 parts or two letters to be more precise to some unidentified "Madam" as she explains her life and how she wound up in a happy place through her life of vice in a couple of different houses of ill-repute shall we say. She ended up better off than the geisha in Memoirs of a Geisha it seems.

Given the way the author repeatedly describes the male appendage I think it clear that a male wrote this book. That made me laugh! For I do not think if a lady had authored the same work it would be have been described in the various ways it was. I'll just leave that there.

Its graphic nature was certainly not something I expected to be getting myself into and certainly not from 1749! They were naughty back then! There were two things notably absent from it but I am not going to say what here. If you are piqued to pick this one up and read you can find out for yourself! So There!

Now, I'm going to return to reading something more in line with what I typically read as far as classic literature. Join me?