["Fanny"] is a literary prodigy. It reaches back to an earlier century for its very life: language, spirit and shape…. Miss Jong is reported to have begun her book by wondering: What if Tom Jones had been a woman? The question is irresistible. It made me wonder whether to begin this review with an immovable answer: Erica Jong is not Henry Fielding. But that answer will not do. The fearful collision of these novelists has resulted, not in an impasse, but in an explosion, a surge of literary energy. (p. 1)

A perverse epic in prose, then. Earnest, not mock-heroic. Our first-person heroine has literary ambitions—and a mind, as she frequently tells us….

An entertaining novel, but also a novel of ideas. I do not mean merely that references to Shaftesbury and Mandeville, Voltaire and Locke, Pascal and La Rochefoucauld are bandied about at the drop of a garter. I do not mean merely that an educated ex-slave takes pleasure in tormenting less advantaged white folks with relentless quotations in Latin. I mean that there are two related arguments which govern the movement of the book….

I still harbor a sneaking affection, I confess, for the discredited theory of witchcraft advanced by the scholar Margaret A. Murray. It made me happy to see her data, at least, taken seriously in this novel…. Erica Jong has made mythic use of [Murray's views]—stunning use—by concentrating on the matriarchal power of witchcraft. It is a power she stresses from beginning to end, and she hangs her plot on the notion.

More problematic is the book's feminism. Fanny's never-ending analysis of relations between men and women is embedded in her own experience. And yet her opinions are so awfully up-to-date: our date, 1980. Somehow, incredibly, this strategy works…. It would be naïve to insist that an 18th-century heroine who is in confident command of the entire arsenal of 20th-century feminism is a heroine who defies belief. The atavistic novel knows its true audience. The problem of believability—and I think there is one—lies elsewhere.

It lies in Fanny's pretensions to grand intellectual prowess. If there is any indication in the text that Miss Jong fails to take Fanny at her own inflated estimate, I must have missed it. Fanny is certainly no ninny, as she more than once assures us—but neither is she a powerful intellectual agent dispensing wisdom through the medium of fiction. She can be tedious, garrulous and banal, even for her own age. When she is bewitching, as (thank the Goddess!) she most often is, her power lies in her voice. She can speak to us with the feeling simplicity of Richardson's Pamela, she can speak with the passionate clarity of his Clarissa. It is only when she discourses as though she were one of de Sade's heroines, whose sufferings serve their author as an excuse for genuine intellectual inquiry, that Fanny becomes insupportable, less a memoirist than a mouthpiece. Some readers are going to mistake this book for nothing more than a didatic novel. And more it certainly is….

What distinguishes Erica Jong's "Fanny" is its endless innocence, its exuberant roughness. The effect (whatever the century) is one of romantic excess.

If Miss Jong betrays a lust to be compendious, to include as much of her homework on the Augustan Age as possible, if her ear betrays her into bathetic lapses from the diction of the times (rarely, by the way—she's way ahead of Thackeray in this respect), these imperfections are more than made up by an abundance of luminous passages. Fanny never hesitates to violate decorum. She is a contemporary heroine chained to a romantic sage with neoclassical links. These constraints turn the pornographic narrative into a prodigious work of fiction. (p. 20)