Moll Flanders
1722
Born in Newgate prison to a convicted thief, Moll Flanders escapes the gallows only to inhabit every stratum of criminal and moral existence the eighteenth century had to offer. She spends twelve years as a prostitute, marries five times (once, unknowingly, her own brother), robs households for a dozen years, and is transported to Virginia as a convict. And yet this is not a tale of degradation but of relentless, unsentimental survival. Defoe presents Moll's life as her own memoir, written from "her own memorandums," and the effect is startlingly intimate. We watch her calculate, adapt, and occasionally deceive her way through a world that offers women only two paths: marriage (a form of dependency) or servitude. The genius lies in Defoe's double vision: Moll appears both as a criminal who deserves punishment and as a woman maneuvering through a society that criminalized her very existence. The novel refuses easy moral judgment, instead asking what survival costs when you begin with nothing. It endures because it remains ruthlessly honest about desire, class, and the lengths to which a clever woman might go to escape poverty.
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“I saw the Cloud, though I did not foresee the Storm.””
— Daniel Defoe
“I am giving an account of what was, not of what ought or ought not to be.””
— Daniel Defoe
“I had been tricked once by that Cheat called love, but the Game was over...””
— Daniel Defoe
“He look'd a little disorder'd, when he said this, but I did not apprehend any thing from it at that time, believing as it us'd to be said, that they who do those things never talk of them; or that they who talk of such things never do them.””
— Daniel Defoe
“If a young women once thinks herself handsome, she never doubts the truth of any man that tells her he is in love with her; for if she believes herself charming charming enough to captive him, 'tis natural to expect the effects of it.””
— Daniel Defoe
“Diligence and Application have their due Encouragement, even in the remotest Parts of the World, and that no Case can be so low, so despicable, or so empty of Prospect, but that an unwearied Industry will go a great way to deliver us from it, will in time raise the meanest Creature to appear again in the World, and give him a new Case for his Life.””
— Daniel Defoe
“I rather wished for their ruin, than studied to avoid it.””
— Daniel Defoe
“She is always Married too soon, who gets a bad Husband, and she is never Married too late, who gets a good one.””
— Daniel Defoe
“Where love is the case, the doctor's an ass””
— Daniel Defoe
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Defoe, Daniel. Moll Flanders. Lex, lex-books.com/book/moll-flanders-5161c62f-b149-498c-9060-3273b4e2fe97.Defoe, D. (1722). Moll Flanders. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/moll-flanders-5161c62f-b149-498c-9060-3273b4e2fe97Defoe, Daniel. Moll Flanders. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/moll-flanders-5161c62f-b149-498c-9060-3273b4e2fe97.
