Moll Flanders
A resourceful woman navigates 18th-century English society and colonial America over a lifetime of seventy years, using her wit and resilience in her quest for wealth and happiness.
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- Length
- 138,000 words
- Reading time
- About 8 hours
- Format
- EPUB, DRM-free
About the book
After the success of Robinson Crusoe and its follow-ups, Daniel Defoe published Moll Flanders in 1722. It’s an episodic, picaresque novel that recounts Moll’s long life of misadventures. It has a journalistic, plain style, with unadorned, prosaic speech that flows naturally from story to story.
The novel is written as a purported autobiography over the course of the narrator’s life. As a young orphan in poverty, Moll claims she wants to be a “gentlewoman” when she gets older, not fully understanding what the term means. What she desires is simply independence and a life free from servitude. In adulthood, she pursues this in two ways. She first attempts to find security by marrying a wealthy husband, and—after several failures and diminishing options—she turns to thievery. In her interactions, Moll proves streetsmart, deft, and quick on her feet. By traveling back and forth between England and the American colonies, the novel offers a lens into different societies through a variety of occupations.
This is the Standard Ebooks edition, carefully proofread and typeset, with a table of contents and linked footnotes.
