By writing an imitation eighteenthcentury novel, Jong exemplifies one tenet of feminist scholarship: The work in almost every field of knowledge must be re-evaluated — and often redone — once it is recognized that men have picked topics for scientific investigation, written literature, recorded history, and engaged in philosophical speculation without even realizing that masculine privilege shaped their view of the world. The great majority of women who appear in literature written before 1800 are men's women: that is, their thoughts, feelings, behavior, concerns and sexual responses were invented by male authors. In Fanny, Jong writes a book that an eighteenth-century woman with her protagonist's literary ambitions might have produced had she not been culturally silenced.

The first-person narrator, Fanny Hackabout-Jones, consistently gives voice to the underside of history. Visiting London, she notices the beggars, the maimed, the imprisoned and helpless. Pornography's other aspect is exposed by...