Moll Flanders

Moll Flanders tells her own story: born in Newgate prison to a mother who was transported for theft, she is raised by the parish, seduced young, and goes through five husbands, one of whom turns out to be her own brother. When her looks fade, she becomes one of the most skilful thieves in London, until she is caught and sent to Virginia, where she finally prospers.

Published in 1722, the novel is frank about money, sex and survival in a world where a woman alone had few options, and Moll is vivid, practical and never entirely trustworthy. Defoe presents it as a moral tale of repentance, but readers have always enjoyed the sins more. Compare his Robinson Crusoe.

Daniel Defoe (c. 1660–1731) was the son of a London butcher, became a merchant, went bankrupt more than once and turned to writing pamphlets. In 1703 he was put in the pillory for a satire on religious intolerance, and he later worked as a secret agent for the government in Scotland.

He was nearly sixty when he published Robinson Crusoe in 1719, and in the next few years he wrote Moll Flanders and A Journal of the Plague Year. He wrote hundreds of works in all, and is often called one of the fathers of the English novel.