1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 • Eighteenth-Century Life Volume 43, Number 2, April 2019 doi 10.1215/00982601-7492909 Copyright 2019 by Duke University Press 76 Fanny’s Feelings: Social Mobility and Emotions in Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure Laura J. Rosenthal University of Maryland, College Park John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure has proven a challenge to classify. Cases for this novel’s literary value —that is, as anything beyond a device for sexual stimulation—have had to address accusations of a paucity of character development, an inelegant style, a lack of social insight, and, in particular, a limited emotional range at a time when so many other writers were exploring human sentiment in unprecedented ways. As Leo Braudy pointed out in 1970, not long after Memoirs first became widely available, the story of Fanny Hill on the one hand has “too much erotic content for the literary historian to treat it with much seriousness,” but on the other cannot be dismissed as entirely a “pornotopia.” 1 Since Braudy’s important essay, Memoirs has become a legitimate object of study, partly as a result of a broader transformation in literary studies to include a wide range of texts previously dismissed as marginal, such as travel narratives, crime stories, pirate tales, and periodical writing, among others. Scholarly attention to women, gender, and the history of sexuality has also prompted new interest in the adventures of the period’s most famous literary prostitute. Yet the problem that Braudy originally identified remains part of the discussion, and in this essay I am going to suggest that it can be produc- tively addressed by suspending the search for moral analysis of sexual ECL432_08Rosenthal_1pp.indd 76 1/9/19 10:27 AM