Moll Flanders

Moll Flanders is a picaresque novel by the English writer Daniel Defoe, first published in 1722 under the full title The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders. It was originally presented with no author named at all, as if it were a genuine autobiography, and the book was not publicly attributed to Defoe until 1770, nearly four decades after his death. The narrative follows a woman who takes the alias Moll Flanders as she recounts her own life from a childhood born in Newgate Prison through old age, describing a series of five marriages, repeated financial ruin, a long career as a skilled thief in London, imprisonment, and eventual transportation to the American colonies, before she achieves lasting wealth and expresses religious repentance for her past. Told throughout in Moll's own frank, unsentimental first-person voice, the novel is regarded as an important early landmark of the English novel form and has been read both as a spiritual autobiography tracing a pattern of sin and redemption and as an unusually clear-eyed portrait of a woman actively pursuing her own economic survival and independence against the constraints of eighteenth-century society.