This was inspiring. Written in epistolary form - 2 long letters to an unnamed recipient, it deals with case of an unfortunate young maid of 15 whose parents are carried off by Smallpox, and must find her way in London.
Naturally, she soon falls in with a bawd and bad company, and is found lodgings in a brothel.
Thus follow her adventures as a "Woman of Pleasure", and she is by and large by no means an unwilling or unhappy participant. The first bawd, to break her into the spirit of things, sends one of her more experienced ladies to tuck in with a few nights and stoke the fire....
Things continue, and while there is never an obscene word - or even phrase, verily you can't read a sentence or paragraph without getting the vulgar, though tenderly written, gist of what she's saying...
Now - this is amazing, for an "erotic novel", in that it describes the same act, on rare occasion of 2 positions, in a hundred different ways. The same act. There's no "French Style" or "Italian Style" or "Greek Style", and for the French, was it simply the hygiene of the era was so bad? But she describes frequent hot baths in oils, etc, etc, perfumes, so - maybe simply not to the authors taste. Although the speculation as to his homosexuality may have prejudiced any inside knowledges as to the practices thereof.
And an interesting point, our narrator has a couple of stories of homosexual men, of whom she accuses of being depraved and despicable beyond measure (despite finding them attractive) - and this - I found funny, she judges not her own initiations at the same weight.
You can read it here online: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/25305/25305-h/25305-h.htm
Contrast this with Gilbert Gottfried's reading of "50 Shades of Grey".
Clearly - there's no blaming Gottfried given the source, but the difference in prose stylings shows a very clear winner and loser.
In the end, from her meagre triflings with vice she comes to a fuller appreciation of Virtue, which, in it's summary at the end, reads about as sincerely as De Sade's final lines in "Justine".
But - of the time, the genre, indeed a masterpiece.