Fanny Hill: why people keep trying to ban the racy novel about 'a woman of pleasure'

A London university is said to have struck John Cleland’s 1748 novel off its reading list for fear of offending sensitive millennials. Censorship, mollycoddling or silly-season tosh?Over the weekend, we were informed that Royal Holloway, University of London, has “banned” the novel Fanny Hill out of a supposed fear of causing offence to students. Royal Holloway was originally a ladies’ institution – no connection with the women’s prison. The founder was “Doctor” Holloway, a pharmacist who made a fortune out of pills advertising “an infallible cure for female complaints”.Fanny Hill has an interesting history. John Cleland, a rakehell, wrote the novel in debtors’ prison in 1748. Denied his doxies, his imagination went into overdrive. But he boasted to James Boswell, himself no mean pornographer (see his London Journal), that he could write a sexually exciting story of “a woman of pleasure” without using a single “foul” word. Continue reading…
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