Terry Eagleton writes:

Fanny Hill in Bombay is an impressively learned, scrupulously detailed study of John Cleland, author of one of the most salacious pieces of fiction in the English language. At the age of 18, Cleland arrived in Bombay in the service of the East India Company, where his skill at writing and talent for languages smoothed his progress from foot soldier to attorney, and from there to secretary of the Bombay council. One of his colleagues in India, Charles Carmichael, encouraged him to try his hand at a piece of pornography, though Gladfelder, who has a penchant for the dialogic and intertextual, speculates that the work, later to become Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure and then, revised and expurgated, Memoirs of Fanny Hill, was something of a joint enterprise between Cleland and Carmichael. If this is true, then we are partly indebted for one of the smuttiest novels ever published to the son of a Scottish earl, a man whose brothers included an ambassador, an Archbishop of Dublin, an MP and a page to George II.

(LRB 13 September 2012)

Johns Hopkins | Hardback 328 pp. |ISBN: 9781421404905