Fanny Hill

Fanny's parents die of smallpox, Esther Davis abandons her at a London inn, and an intelligence office puts her into Mrs Brown's service.

Fanny is installed at Mrs Brown's as a companion, and her bedfellow Phoebe spends the first night teaching her hands what pleasure is.

Dressed for market, Fanny is shown to the elderly Mr Crofts, who assaults her on the settee until her screams bring the maid Martha up.

A fever reprieves Fanny and Crofts is jailed for debt, and from a dark closet she watches Mrs Brown entertain a young horse grenadier.

Phoebe sets Fanny at a crevice to watch Polly Phillips and her Genoese merchant, which cures her fear of what a man might do to her.

Fanny finds Charles asleep in the parlour, elopes with him to Chelsea, and gives up her maidenhead there in more pain than she expected.

Fanny wakes first and studies the sleeping Charles at length, and afterwards learns his history and the grandmother who funds him.

Charles and a lawyer frighten Mrs Brown into giving up Fanny's box, and the pair take lodgings with Mrs Jones for eleven happy months.

Charles is shipped to the South Seas by his father, Fanny miscarries, and Mrs Jones's debts deliver her insensible to Mr H.

A supper and a bridal posset reconcile Fanny to Mr H, who keeps her all night and sets her up as a kept mistress with a maid of her own.

Fanny watches Mr H take her maid through a knot hole in the door, and plans her revenge on his young country servant Will.

Will examines Fanny by daylight and has her again, and after a bath and a night's sleep she finds herself unaltered and sends for him.

Mr H catches Fanny with Will and turns her off with fifty pieces, and Mrs Cole takes her in and lodges her beside her Covent Garden shop.

Fanny joins Mrs Cole's household of three girls and agrees to sell a counterfeit maidenhead, and Emily tells how she lost her own at an inn.

Harriet tells how she watched a youth swim naked, fainted believing him drowned, and woke to find he had already had her on the couch.

Louisa tells of her bastard birth and her early solitary experiments, and how the lodger's son found her asleep and finished them.

The revels begin with a couch fetched into the room, and Louisa and then Harriet are enjoyed in turn in front of the whole company.

Emily is taken standing by her stout gallant, then Fanny is stripped bare before the room and enjoyed twice by her own young gentleman.

Fanny is paid and pronounced initiated, her gallant is carried off to Ireland, and a pale stranger follows her round a fruit shop.

The stranger proves to be Norbert, a hunter of maidenheads, and Mrs Cole sells him Fanny's counterfeit one for three hundred guineas.

Fanny uses Mrs Cole's sponge of false blood to convince Norbert, whose feeble powers later send her off with a sailor to a tavern.

Norbert goes to Bath and dies there of a fever, and Fanny takes on Mr Barville, whipping him with birch rods at his own request.

Barville whips Fanny in his turn, an old gentleman pays merely to comb her hair, and Emily is carried to a bagnio by a man wanting a boy.

A broken axle strands Fanny at an inn, where she spies two young men through a hole and knocks herself senseless trying to raise the house.

Louisa takes Dick, the idiot flower seller, upstairs to satisfy her curiosity, and gets a great deal more than she had bargained for.

A bathing party on the Thames, then Emily is reclaimed by her parents, Mrs Cole retires, and Fanny meets an old gentleman in the fields.

The old gentleman makes Fanny his heiress and dies, and on the road north she hears Charles's voice at an inn and faints into his arms.

Fanny and Charles pass the night as man and wife, she gives up her fortune to him, he marries her, and the letter closes on her moral.