John Cleland

John Cleland (born 1709—died Jan. 23, 1789, London) was an English novelist, known as the author of the notorious Fanny Hill; or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. After serving as a consul at Smyrna and later as an agent of the British East India Company in Bombay, Cleland became a penniless wanderer who drifted from place to place and was apparently confined several times in English debtors’ prisons. In such reduced circumstances, he wrote...