The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders
The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders
Born in a dungeon to a convict mother, abandoned before she can crawl, Moll Flanders claws her way up through the brutal currents of 18th-century England. She marries five times, commits bigamy, falls into prostitution, picks pockets on the streets of London, and eventually lands in the colonies - yet every sin is narrated with such disarming candor and calculating wit that the reader becomes her unlikely accomplice. This is not a morality tale. Defoe gives us an unreliable, brilliant, unrepentant narrator who refuses to ask forgiveness for the crime of surviving in a world that offered her nothing. Is she a villain? A victim? A survivor who simply did what was necessary? The answer shifts with every page, and that's precisely why this novel still feels dangerous. One of the first English novels and still one of the most radical - a tour de force of female voice in an era that had none.
