[Rogers is an English educator, editor, and critic. In the following review, he provides a positive assessment of Fanny.]

Have you met Miss Jones? The real Fanny Hill can at last stand up (or lie down, most of the time): it turns out that her true identity is that of Fanny Hackabout Jones, a foundling brought up in one of the stately homes of Wiltshire. Only, in the end, [of Fanny], it emerges that she is not who she seems. John Cleland got everything hopelessly tangled up [in his Fanny Hill; or Memoirs of a woman of Pleasure]: well, that's no surprise. Erica Jong relates Fanny's "True History" in three books, all but 500 pages, of pseudo-authentic language. Stylistic mannerisms by Fielding; plot rather by Smollett; research supervised by the late James Clifford and J. H. Plumb (not to mention a research trip to Bath, conducted by Russell Harty, "which was invaluable even though Bath did not finally appear in the novel"). The aim is to be true "to the spirit, if not the letter, of the eighteenth century." One has to say it: Erica Jong has succeeded remarkably well.

The most surprising thing about Fanny is that it really does concern the eighteenth century. Readers expecting a sequel to the adventures of Isadora Wingwill puzzle the text into convenient shapes, but the will be distorting the genuine imaginative flight-path. Sure enough, the novel has strong feminist overtones: but the sexual politics make only qualified sense in contemporary terms, and Fanny has more in common with the eighteenth-century blacks she encounters than with Isadora, "growing up female in America" during the 1950s and 1960s. Fanny faces repression not just from cultural or socio-economic circumstances, but as a legal entity. Her mode of escape is correspondingly violent; she is on the wrong side of so many laws that a few infractions of polite moeurs wouldn't do much good.

Here then be ripped bodices, witchcraft, piracy, torture, murder, suicide, highway robbery, execution at the yardarm, madness, nay cruelty to horses. Fanny undergoes most of the varieties of sexual experience, without Isadora's excuse of curiosity. While she is a prostitute, she has dealings with Jonathan Swift, whose well-known obsession with horses leads him to attempt an experiment in bestiality. John Cleland exchanges clothes with her: they both enjoy this, as Fanny feels liberated in men's clothing and spends a lot of the book in drag. Later on, Fanny meets a ship's captain whose repressed homosexuality can only be sublimated by sadism, flagellation, coprophilia and bondage. (He is a slaver, and a slaverer, as one might say, to boot.)

Erica Jong has tried to give us what the blurbs used to call "the entire teeming spectacle". In Fanny this means ranging from country estates (Gothic piles, with formal landscaping, in the process of being Palladianized and Picturesquified) to London and the wider world. The city is lovingly evoked in all its squalor. Cries of "gardyloo" cleave the air as Fanny makes her way from whorehouse to Newgate, risking omnia citra mortem as she takes on a male world and a rationalist culture. For there are deists abroad (the slave-captain is that, too), apostles of optimistic Shaftesburian philosophy who turn their eyes away from the stench. Nobody could accuse the author of doing so. Along with the street cries and the Medmenham Monks, the ropedancers and the fairgrounds, there is a constant undertow of reference to biology. Fanny samples the unreliable abortive devices of the age; she witnesses mutilation and branding. No cosy Hanoverian dawn in this book.

In How to Save Your Own Life, Erica Jong described California as a wet dream in the mind of New York. Fanny is assuredly better adapted to wet-bobs than dry-bobs. As the heroine reflects:

What a Profusion of Fluids is the Female Form! Milk, Tears, Blood—these are our Elements. We seem to be fore'er awash in Humours of divers Sorts. O we are made of Waters; we are like the Seas, teeming with Life of ev'ry Shape and Colour!

The author extracts a woozy poetry from this dampness, in which the buried equivalence seems to align reason, enlightenment and cruelty with the "dry" masculine powers. The crucial act for women is suckling, which puts them in touch with ancient instinctual forces and the radiant mysteries of being. Thus the metaphysic at the heart of the work is coherent, if not especially original.

Plainly, the only way to deal with this noisome world is through comedy. Fanny is not often pervaded by laughter, but there are moments of high camp: the female pirate Anne Bonny on the prow, with a cutlass in her hand and a rose in her mouth. Or the episode when Alexander Pope (sadly prone to premature ejaculation) lets slip the punch-line of his still unwritten Essay on Man in discoursing with Fanny on sexual inequality. There are crowds of quotations in the text, knowingly dropped for fellow-buffs to pick up at the author's behest.

In Fear of Flying the heroine was engaged in a study of sexual slang in eighteenth-century poetry. Erica Jong's studies are displayed in lists to delight Panurge's heart, of words for the male and female pudenda, of synonyms for "whore", of fairground turns. The elaborate research seldom obtrudes distractingly, though some of the file-cards on piracy might happily have been scattered to the ocean winds.

Erica Jong states in an afterword that she has "to a large extent" confined herself to the language of the period. That is fair comment, and the intrusion of some anachronistic words (tart; dustbin; pansy; bill and focus as verbs; sucker; to bore; even bluestocking) doesn't seriously interfere with the author's purposes. Slightly more worrying is Pope's "sensitive" expression, which needs another fifty years of aesthetic development to give it the right meaning. There are a few lapses in idiom: "sheer, irrational Delight" rings false, as does theremark, "That must be quite some Letter". The most serious flaw is the repeated introduction of "Hubris" as an item of colloquial English, which is wildly out of key with the age.

The factual background is convincingly presented. There wouldn't have been many locks (just millweirs) as Fanny sailed from the Chilterns towards London: and there was no such address as 17 Hanover Square in 1724—the house later so designated had just been built, but numbering had not yet caught on. Finally, the pastoral vision of "the black and white Cows eating the beautiful moist Grass" belongs to modern Wiltshire—the meadows would then have contained not Friesians but the old longhorn breeds of cattle.

But Erica Jong does not claim absolute historical accuracy, and it is something she can afford to forgo. Fanny is at all events a much better book than Cleland's original Memoirs, with their rootless London and repetitive devices. Erica Jong has produced a richer work, with more ideas about the human condition, more tonal unity, a larger command of narrative, a deeper primal literary impulse. For this Fanny above all wants to write—screwing is mostly incidental—and she has an identity beyond the sexual. The book will be damned as inauthentic by people who wouldn't know 1710 from 1790, and put down by critics whose rhetoric of fiction never took them beyond chapter three of their own great opus. For readers who think that popular fiction can be entertaining without being irredeemably silly or vapid, Erica Jong has delivered a convincing piece of positive evidence.

Pat Rogers, "Blood, Milk and Tears," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4047, October 24, 1980, p. 1190.