Memoirs of women of pleasure: the whore biography

Abstract

Autobiographies written by courtesans became a popular form of reading entertainment towards the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. Their memoirs fit into a corpus of erotic literature which ranged from euphemistic racy tales to explicit pornography. This cache of material created images of female sexuality. Yet the autobiographies are particularly important as they include images of the sexually active woman as seen/created by the women themselves. Their titillating revelations, in the form of affair-studded memoirs, became best-sellers, thereby offering the women an important new source of earnings, and throwing a revealing light on the dilemmas of the sexual women at this time.