In the summer of 1756, Sir Richard Atkins, a minor English baronet, died, leaving his widow Fanny with nothing but debt. She was twenty-seven, her beauty was fading, and the men who had once surrounded her vanished without a trace. When her creditors closed in, she was taken to a sponging house, a kind of private debtors prison where the unfortunate awaited their fate while friends and family were given the chance to pay what was owed. It was a grim end for a woman who, little more than a decade earlier, had been one of the most celebrated and sought-after courtesans in all of England.
Her origins were far humbler. Most scholars believe Fanny was born in Bath, in the southwest of England, in 1729, to a musician named Rodman. The name Murray was adopted later, a performance name she took when she moved into courtesan work in London. Her father moved in respectable circles, counting among his acquaintances the well-known dandy Richard Nash, the master of ceremonies in Bath.
But that comfortable middle-class life collapsed when Fanny was still a child. Her mother, of whom almost nothing is known, predeceased her father, who died around 1741, when Fanny was just twelve. Suddenly orphaned and impoverished, she took to selling flowers on the streets of Bath to survive. It did not take long for her to attract attention.
Watching the wealthy older gentlemen of Bath parade through town with beautiful women at their side, she caught the eye of John Spencer, a thirty-four-year-old philanderer and grandson of the great general John Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough. Spencer charmed her with fine words and promises he never intended to keep, seduced her, and then abandoned her. She might have been ruined, left with no reputation and no prospects, had Richard Nash not stepped in. Nash, then in his sixties, took the orphaned girl into his home, provided for her, and gave her a taste for the finer things in life.
By 1743, Fanny had moved to London, where she entered the world of the dress lodger. In that arrangement, a wealthy patron provided the initial funds for a young woman to set herself up as a high-end courtesan, financing the dresses, jewelry, and expensive cosmetics needed to entertain rich and powerful men. Nash was likely her first patron, but by the late 1740s she was managed by Jack Harris, a prominent London pimp who may have served as the inspiration for Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies, a directory of the city’s sex workers. Before finding Harris, her finances had collapsed and she was forced to work as a common streetwalker, selling herself for small sums.
With Harris’s help, her fortunes reversed dramatically. By the end of the 1740s, Fanny Murray was one of the most famous women in London, counting leading aristocrats among her clients. It was even said she had so many callers that she hired a look-alike to appear in an outer room while she entertained gentlemen in another, effectively serving twice as many clients. According to one diary of the time, it was considered a vice not to be acquainted with Fanny Murray, and a crime not to toast her at every meal.
Her influence soon extended well beyond the bedroom. She became a fashion icon, so closely watched that every woman in town copied even the smallest change in her style, while their husbands secretly bought miniature portraits of her to slip inside their pocket watches. Her reputation reached a wider public in the 1750s when woodcuts and broadside pamphlets bearing her name appeared in London. One, titled The Careless Maid, offered supposed sexual advice from Fanny or promised to teach readers how to become a complete French lady, though whether she had anything to do with it is doubtful.
More likely, printers simply used her famous name to sell copies. It is also probable that Fanny served as part of the inspiration for one of eighteenth-century England’s most notorious publications. In late 1748 and early 1749, John Cleland, a con man sitting in debtors prison, wrote Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, better known as Fanny Hill. The novel tells the story of an orphaned teenager who begins working as a prostitute in London, a narrative that clearly overlapped with Fanny Murray’s life.
The book then descends into erotic material considered extreme by the standards of the time and was quickly banned, remaining so until the late twentieth century, though illegal copies continued to circulate. Many people assumed Murray was part of Cleland’s inspiration. In the early 1750s, her notoriety grew again when news emerged that she was attending notorious private societies in London. The Hellfire Club, a secret fraternity for high-society men, had been founded in 1718 by the Duke of Wharton, but its most infamous incarnation began in 1749 under Francis Dashwood.
Members spent their evenings in heavy drinking and behavior that defied social and moral norms. Though it was a male-only society, Fanny was apparently employed on occasion to appear dressed as a nun and entertain the assembled gentlemen in obscene revelry. She also attended the Divan Club, founded in 1744 by John Montagu, the fourth Earl of Sandwich, a sometime lover of hers. That club, which took its name from the couches used in the Ottoman Empire, was a members-only dining society for men who had visited Turkey.
Fanny was part of the harem, a gathering with sexual overtones, but her exact role remains unclear. The club folded in the second half of the 1740s as several members left to join the more notorious Hellfire Club. Around the same time, Fanny made a surprising decision: she married Sir Richard Atkins, a minor English noble roughly her own age who had squandered much of his family’s wealth on famous courtesans before finally marrying one himself. Their marriage was volatile, and neither partner was entirely faithful.
According to a famous anecdote, Fanny once complained that she needed spending money, and Atkins handed her a measly twenty-pound note. Humiliated, she snatched the note, placed it between two pieces of bread, and ate it, declaring that twenty pounds meant nothing to her. The marriage was short-lived. Atkins died in the summer of 1756, leaving Fanny nothing but debt.
Her rescue came from an unexpected source. John Spencer, the young man who would become the first Earl Spencer, was the son of the man who had ruined her in Bath. When Fanny sent him a begging letter detailing his father’s misdeeds, the younger Spencer behaved with remarkable generosity, granting her an allowance of two hundred pounds a year. He also introduced her to his friend David Ross, an English actor and theater owner who had performed in numerous productions on the Dublin and London stages.
Fanny and Ross fell in love and married within the year, to everyone’s amazement. The union was a happy one. She abandoned her work as a courtesan in 1757 and remained loyal to Ross for the rest of her life. In 1759, a memoir appeared in London titled Memoirs of the celebrated Miss Fanny Murray, interspersed with the intrigues and amours of several eminent persons, founded on real facts.
Written anonymously in the third person, it seems fairly clear that Fanny was responsible for either writing it or overseeing its contents. It was one of several such memoirs detailing the lives of London’s most famed courtesans. Even in retirement, her past followed her. In 1763, a new work appeared in London titled An Essay on Woman, an obscene parody of Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Man.
It was the work of John Wilkes, a radical journalist and controversial politician, possibly written in collaboration with Thomas Potter, a fellow MP and member of the Hellfire Club. After detailing Fanny’s purported sexual adventures, Wilkes and Potter audaciously compared her to the Virgin Mary, an act of blasphemy that could not be ignored in a century when religion still dominated British life. Fanny had no part in writing the poem, but it quickly came to her attention, upsetting her deeply and briefly straining her marriage. Late in 1763, John Montagu, the fourth Earl of Sandwich and one of her former lovers, read the poem aloud in the House of Lords.
Sandwich held a grudge against Wilkes from an incident at the Hellfire Club when Wilkes had scarred him during a drunken seance. He accused Wilkes of obscenity and blasphemy, and the House of Lords agreed. Wilkes was convicted of libel and sedition in January 1764, though he had already fled to France, expecting the attack. No charges were ever made against Murray.
Fanny spent her final years in quiet domesticity with Ross, who stated that whatever her former indiscretions, she had conducted herself as a wife with exemplary prudence and discretion. They lived mostly in London, where Ross had become a successful actor, director, and producer, and they also traveled to Scotland occasionally for his performances in Edinburgh. They appear to have had no children. Fanny Murray died in London on April 2, 1778, at around forty-eight years of age.
Her story lived on, though, through her fictional counterpart. Fanny Hill and its many adaptations, from banned eighteenth-century printings to a 2007 BBC miniseries, have carried a version of her name into the modern era. It is a strange legacy for an orphaned flower seller from Bath, but one she earned more than a century before her name became a byword for scandal.