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  • A society driven by riches

  • "My course of life for forty years had been a horrid complication of wickedness, whoredom, adultery, incest, lying, theft; and in a word, everything but murder and treason had been my practice."

    That quote sums up the whole novel. Defoe shows a woman who is so terrified by poverty, that she g ... Continue

    "My course of life for forty years had been a horrid complication of wickedness, whoredom, adultery, incest, lying, theft; and in a word, everything but murder and treason had been my practice."

    That quote sums up the whole novel. Defoe shows a woman who is so terrified by poverty, that she goes from a series of marriages and then becomes a pickpocket in order to provide for herself. An interesting character study with an entertaining plot.

    

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• ― MoirneStark said on Jul 31, 2008 about the Paperback edition| Add your feedback

Written in a time when criminal biographies enjoyed great success, Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders details the life of the irresistible Moll and her struggles through poverty and sin in search of property and power. Born in Newgate Prison to a picaresque mother, Moll propels herself through marriages, periods of success and destitution, and a trip to the New World and back, only to return to the place of her birth as a popular prostitute and brilliant thief. The story of Moll Flanders vividly illustrates Defoe’s themes of social mobility and predestination, sin, redemption and reward.

This Modern Library Paperback Classic is set from the 1721 edition printed by Chetwood in London, the only edition approved by Defoe.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

• 18th centuryfiction16-18th century litbritish lit18CclassicsTo-Read