In the following excerpt, Epstein discusses the possible sources for the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, including both classical and contemporary texts as well as Cleland's own experience with the social and ethical standards of mid-eighteenth-century England.

In the following essay, Braudy suggests that Cleland's Fanny Hill was influenced by the materialism that was part of the most advanced philosophic thought of Cleland's time.

In the following excerpt, Miller argues that Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (Fanny Hill) can be interpreted as a female Bildungsroman in the tradition of other apprenticeship or coming-of-age novels popular in the eighteenth century.

In the following essay, Bradbury argues that as an example of the era's experimentation in novelistic form, Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure may not be exceptionally good, but it does demonstrate the attempts of eighteenth-century novelists to combine powerful individual episodes into a unified lengthy narrative.

In the following essay, Hollander asserts that Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure or Fanny Hill observes the conventions necessary to a successful pornographic work and presents an appealing, literary evocation of its central character.

In the following essay, Copeland identifies and discusses the similarities between the metaphors used for descriptions of vice in Fanny Hill and for virtue in Clarissa.

In the following essay, Slepian and Morrissey defend Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure as a work of literature, arguing that as such, it is a novel of education and intentionally comic.

In the following essay, Kramer argues that, contrary to the view of its supporters, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (Fanny Hill) does not meet literary criteria but is instead mere pornography born of Cleland's financial troubles.

In the following essay, Taube compares Cleland's whore biography with Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders, considering Cleland's novel more successful as pornography because it is less engaged with the realities of eighteenth-century life and presents scenes of idealized sexual fantasy.