
                                  John Cleland

                         Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure

                                Letter the First

Madam,
    I sit down to give you an undeniable proof of my considering your desires as
indispensable orders. Ungracious then as the task may be, I shall recall to view
those scandalous stages of my life, out of which I emerg'd, at length, to the
enjoyment of every blessing in the power of love, health, and fortune to bestow;
whilst yet in the flower of youth, and not too late to employ the leisure
afforded me by great ease and affluence, to cultivate an understanding,
naturally not a despicable one, and which had, even amidst the whirl of loose
pleasures I had been tost in, exerted more observation on the characters and
manners of the world than what is common to those of my unhappy profession, who
looking on all thought or reflection as their capital enemy, keep it at as great
a distance as they can, or destroy it without mercy.
    Hating, as I mortally do, all long unnecessary preface, I shall give you
good quarter in this, and use no farther apology, than to prepare you for seeing
the loose part of my life, wrote with the same liberty that I led it.
    Truth! stark, naked truth, is the word; and I will not so much as take the
pains to bestow the strip of a gauze wrapper on it, but paint situations such as
they actually rose to me in nature, careless of violating those laws of decency
that were never made for such unreserved intimacies as ours; and you have too
much sense, too much knowledge of the ORIGINALS themselves, to sniff prudishly
and out of character at the PICTURES of them. The greatest men, those of the
first and most leading taste, will not scruple adorning their private closets
with nudities, though, in compliance with vulgar prejudices, they may not think
them decent decorations of the staircase, or salon.
    This, and enough, premised, I go souse into my personal history. My maiden
name was Frances Hill. I was born at a small village near Liverpool, in
Lancashire, of parents extremely poor, and, I piously believe, extremely honest.
    My father, who had received a maim on his limbs that disabled him from
following the more laborious branches of country-drudgery, got, by making of
nets, a scanty subsistence, which was not much enlarg'd by my mother's keeping a
little day-school for the girls in her neighbourhood. They had had several
children; but none lived to any age except myself, who had received from nature
