Tail-pieces of morality (NSFW!)

Working furiously this weekend, but with one very funny extra bit of reading. I'm doing a sort of mini-independent study with the two graduate students who are working as my graders for the history of the novel course, we're just reading three extra novels and some bits of criticism, and the first one up for discussion this afternoon is Cleland's Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure.

I don't think I've reread this since undergraduate days. It is really delightful - a sort of blithe defense of libertinism written in a uniquely appealing periphrastic style of considerable elevation! Here's a funny bit from the end:

Charles then roused me sommewhat out of this ecstatic distraction with a complaint softly murmured, amidst a crowd of kisses, at the position, not so favourable to his desires, in which I received his urgent insistence for admission, where that insistence was alone so engrossing a pleasure that it made me inconsistently suffer a much dearer one to be kept out. But how sweet to correct such a mistake! My thighs, now obedient to the imntimations of love and nature, gladly disclose, and with a ready submission resign up the lost gateway to entrance at pleasure: I see! I feel! the delicious velvet tip! -- he enters might and main with -- oh! --- my pen drops from me here in the ecstasy now present to my faithful memory! Description, too, deserts me and delivers over a task, above its strength of wing, to the imagination: but it must be an imagination exalted by such a flame as mine, that can do justice to that sweetest, noblest of all sensations that hailed and accompanied the stiff insinuation all the way up, till it was at the end of its penetration, sending up, all the way up, till it was at the end of its penetration, sending up, through my eyes, the sparks of the love-fire that ran all over me, and blazed in every vein and every pore of me: a system incarnate of joy all over.

The phrase "stiff insinuation" gives me a yen to be reading late Henry James....