Cleland, John

1709–87, English novelist. His Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1750), commonly known as Fanny Hill, was an immediate popular success; the novel's notoriety led to a number of official efforts to ban it over the next two centuries. Traditionally considered the first great pornographic work in English, it is now linked to the works of Richardson and Fielding as a typical mid-18th cent. British novel.

See study by W. Epstein (1974).