Should John Cleland Get a Life?

It seems a propitious moment for a new biography of John Cleland. Almost four decades have passed since the appearance of William H. Epstein's John Cleland: Images of a Life (1974), and the intervening years have witnessed both a raft of critical writing about Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748-49), and important scholarly advances that bear directly on Cleland and his work: a more nuanced understanding of the history of gender and sexuality; a renewed interest in print culture, the history of the book, and shifting ideas about authorship; the establishment of postcolonial studies and an increased attention to Europe's relation to the East (and Britain's to India); and continuing reassessments of the development of prose fiction and the "rise" of the novel in continental Europe.

Yet the challenges facing Cleland's biographer remain much the same as they did in 1974, namely, the outsized place of Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure in the writer's corpus and the disproportionately small amount of documentary evidence about his life. Back in the day, Epstein and his publisher unabashedly exploited Cleland's renown as the inventor of Fanny Hill; the descriptive blurb on the dust jacket identified Cleland as "the author of the world's most famous pornographic novel." Moreover, Epstein acknowledged the archival lacunae, filling the gaps through structural and stylistic "workarounds" borrowed from the world of cinema (the three main sections were titled "Establishing Shots," "Deep Focus," and "Montage"), while at the same time admitting that "flickering images" of Cleland cannot satisfy the biographer's desire for a fully realized, more substantial life.¹

Gladfelder takes a different approach to the relative paucity of reliable documentary evidence about Cleland and the enormous shadow cast by Fanny Hill. On the one hand, he pays close attention to Cleland's other writings, including private letters, translations, anonymously published reviews and political journalism, the bizarre etymological studies, and three other works of fiction: Memoirs of a Coxcomb (1751), a novella collection entitled The Surprises of Love (1764), and The Woman of Honor (1768). On the other hand, Gladfelder treats Cleland as "representative of the conditions of authorship in the latter half of the eighteenth century" (5-6), thereby framing Fanny Hill in Bombay as an exploration of "the historicity of authorship" (3) rather than as a straightforward, fact-based biography. Along the way, Gladfelder synthesizes recent discoveries about Cleland—his own together with the post-1974 finds of other scholars—and brings to bear on his reading of Cleland's works fresh approaches to and new knowledge about the eighteenth-century world.

The dust-jacket illustration, from Jean-Honoré Fragonard's Le Verrou (The Bolt), like the title Fanny Hill in Bombay, plays at making a book otherwise aimed at a fairly narrow academic audience appear sexy and exotic, disguising a scholarly tome as a bodice-ripper. The tease suits Gladfelder's project, which offers the tantalizing prospect of a new and fuller life of Cleland without exactly delivering—or intending to deliver—"a biography in the usual sense of the word" (5). Indeed, the work's subtitle, "The Making and Unmaking of John Cleland," not only evokes the ways in which Fanny Hill at once established and undermined Cleland's reputation, but also adumbrates Gladfelder's interest in Cleland as a creature of words, someone whose identity was made, unmade, and remade by his writings and by his own and others' statements about him. Where Epstein used the idiom of film to give shape to a biography haunted by a shortage of facts, Gladfelder offers a "history or case study of the writer writing" (5). Thus, instead of relying on "a strictly linear chronicle of Cleland's life" (9), Gladfelder emphasizes that "the crux of any such life is the corpus of writing to which the author's name is attached" (240). Ultimately, Gladfelder concedes, "The life, as I have written it, is an outgrowth of my readings of the texts, not...