Fanny Hill and the Modern Romance Novel: Age Before Beauty

In researching for my senior thesis on the impact of woman readers and writers upon the form and respectability of the novel from (roughly) the 1780s to 1810s, I've encountered a lot of eighteenth-century works that I never would have considered to have any relation to the novels that initially inspired this study. I've sifted through conduct books, printed in facsimile and with the dreaded 'long s' staunchly unmodernized; I've scanned treatises on female education; I've become familiar with the plots of several forgotten novels of the century simply because they show up so frequently in modern critical literature.

But perhaps the most surprising discovery has been the frequency of references to The Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure by John Cleland. More frequently known as Fanny Hill, this unabashedly pornographic novel that, as its title suggests, follows the misadventures of a London prostitute, was considered so obscene that a year after its publication in 1748, both its author and publisher were taken to court, and it wasn't legally published again until the 1960s.

I actually read a portion of Fanny Hill for a class while studying abroad at Queen Mary, University of London. The class, entitled "Representing London: the Eighteenth Century," ran for the entire academic year and was organized around different topics in eighteenth-century London, ranging from empire to coffee-houses to, you guessed it, prostitution. Other readings for this week included both proposals to set up a charitable institution for the rehabilitation of repentant prostitutes and a list of "Covent Garden ladies" complete with names, ages, and special skills. (I almost wish I were joking.)

Personally, I don't see a problem with reading things like this in an English classroom -- on the contrary, I'm a firm believer in the significance of literary and cultural context, and that includes popular fiction. But the more I contemplate Fanny Hill and its strangely secure place in critical literature on the eighteenth century, the more I wonder why no space exists in the critical canon for its modern descendants.

That's right. I'm talking about romance novels. (And before you ask, yes, I've read a few of those too.)

When people started to argue for the republication of an authorized edition of Fanny Hill in the 1960s, one of the strongest arguments in its favor was that the text should be considered as a valuable historical document, significant for a reconstruction of eighteenth-century interests and fantasies. I can't disagree with this argument at all; I just can't see why this argument doesn't apply to any text, up to and including present-day works to which audiences might otherwise sport objections. If Fanny Hill is suitable material for university history or English classrooms, why not the modern romance? I can see two potential and interrelated answers to this question, but I don't give either of them much credit.

The first answer is, simply, that because of its age, Fanny Hill has been awarded that strange but unassailable status of "historical document," and that perhaps when modern romance novels are two hundred years old, they, too, will be treated to such academic attention. However, this centuries-long gap that stretches between the appreciation of a work as "popular" and its establishment within the literary/historical canon seems unfair at best, and snobbish at worst. Either way, the attitude that popular literature is only significant long after the period in which it was written results in the significance so many genres being overlooked by academia despite their outrageous popular appeal.

The second answer stems, I suspect, from a sexually conservative desire not to assign as coursework anything potentially titillating, as modern romance novels are universally understood to be. Fanny Hill, in contrast to these more modern novels, is (in this view) conveniently too "old" to have any of that sort of appeal for a modern reader, and can be assigned without comment. But somehow I don't think it survived in pirated editions on two continents for over 200 years because its readers found it too "old" to excite; on the contrary, it's this very sort of engagement with the text that must have kept it in print (even if only illicitly) for centuries. Overlooking evidence such as this seems, at best, slightly silly.

In the gap between Fanny Hill and the modern romance novel, I see a great deal of room for research. For example, what does it mean that sexually explicit literary material has gone from being written predominately by men for men in the eighteenth century to (at least from the popular perspective) being predominately written by women for women in the twenty-first? What effect do the genders of author and audience have upon the presentation of sex and sexuality in print? And why is it that reading and analyzing Fanny Hill is a valid, perhaps even respectable occupation for an academic of any gender, whereas providing a modern romance novel with a similar treatment (especially if you're a woman) is not?

Critics of my argument may be quick to point out that it's unfair of me to equate Fanny Hill and paperback romances, and I admit I've been a bit slipshod in instituting this comparison. Frankly, Fanny Hill is far more explicit than any modern romance novel I've ever personally encountered, and ultimately not as well-written. I'm not about to hazard a guess at the real modern equivalent to Fanny Hill -- but I will suggest that a lot of modern romance novels would probably seem tame in comparison.