John Cleland is among the most scandalous figures in British literary history, both celebrated and attacked as a pioneer of pornographic writing in English. His first novel, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, or Fanny Hill, is one of the enduring literary creations of the eighteenth century, despite over two hundred years of legal prohibition. Yet the full range of his work is still too little known.

In this study, Hal Gladfelder combines groundbreaking archival research into Cleland's tumultuous life with incisive readings of his sometimes extravagant, sometimes perverse...