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.
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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. The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders. Lex, lex-books.com/book/the-fortunes-and-misfortunes-of-the-famous-moll-flanders-d31e1171-3a28-4cfd-bb81-fbf8c7a5e0dd.Defoe, D. (n.d.). The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-fortunes-and-misfortunes-of-the-famous-moll-flanders-d31e1171-3a28-4cfd-bb81-fbf8c7a5e0ddDefoe, Daniel. The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-fortunes-and-misfortunes-of-the-famous-moll-flanders-d31e1171-3a28-4cfd-bb81-fbf8c7a5e0dd.
