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  • Published: 1 November 2000
  • ISBN: 9780679640028
  • Imprint: RH US eBook Adult
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 368

Moll Flanders




Moll Flanders is, according to Virginia Woolf, one of the "few English novels which we can call indisputably great." Written by Defoe in 1722 under a pseudonym so his readers would think it an actual journal of the ribald fortunes and misfortunes of a woman in eighteenth-century London, the book remains a picaresque novel of astonishing vitality. From her birth in Newgate Prison to her ascent to a position of wealth and stature, Moll Flanders demonstrates both a mercantile spirit and an indomitable will. This vivid saga of an irresistible and notorious heroine--her high misdemeanors and delinquencies, her varied careers as a prostitute, a charming and faithful wife, a thief, and a convict--endures today as one of the liveliest, most candid records of a woman's progress through the hypocritical labyrinth of society ever recorded. "Defoe seems to have taken his characters so deeply into his mind that he lived them without exactly knowing how," wrote Virginia Woolf. "Like all unconscious artists, he leaves more gold in his work than his own generation was able to bring to the surface."

  • Published: 1 November 2000
  • ISBN: 9780679640028
  • Imprint: RH US eBook Adult
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 368

Other books in the series

Emma
Persuasion
A Dog's Heart
The Black Tulip
The Lady of the Camellias
Selected Poetry
On Sparta
Man and Superman
Saint Joan
Botchan
Kusamakura
Sanshiro
Love
Annals
Military Dispatches

About the author

Daniel Defoe

Daniel Defoe was born in London in 1660. He worked briefly as a hosiery merchant, then as an intelligence agent and political writer. His writings resulted in his imprisonment on several occasions, and earned him powerful friends and enemies. During his lifetime Defoe wrote over two hundred and fifty books, pamphlets and journals and travelled widely in both Europe and the British Isles. Among his most famous works are Robinson Crusoe (1719), Moll Flanders (1722) and A Journal of the Plague Year (1722). Though Defoe was nearly sixty before he began writing fiction, his work is so fundamental to the development of the novel that he is often cited as the first true English novelist. He is also regarded as a founding father of modern journalism and one of the earliest travel writers. Daniel Defoe died in April 1731.

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