John Cleland

Peter Byrne (Independent Scholar - North America)
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The dearth of biographical information about John Cleland (1710-1789) is partly due to the scandal surrounding the novel for which he is usually remembered,

Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure

(more commonly, and inaccurately, known as “Fanny Hill”, after the main character); many of his contemporaries and their biographers mentioned him briefly and with embarrassment or distaste. Even the recent reassessment of the work has not corrected this situation fully; the only significant biographical study remains William Epstein's

John Cleland: Images of a Life

(1974), from which much of the following is derived.

John Cleland was born in 1710 in Kingston, Surrey, the oldest of three children (brother Henry b. 1711, sister Charlotte Lucy, uncertain birth-date). His family, in the words of Robert

1849 words

Citation: Byrne, Peter. "John Cleland". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 20 October 2001 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=915, accessed 19 March 2024.]

915 John Cleland 1 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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