Abandoned at birth and threatened with a life in service, Defoe's young heroine sets her heart on independence. One fatal seduction and five husbands later, she resorts to a life of self-supporting crime. Moll Flanders follows this indestructible heroine to the depths of eighteenth century England's corruption.

As Moll Flanders struggles for survival amid the harsh social realities of seventeenth-century England, there is but one snare she is determined to avoid - the deadly snare of poverty. On the twisting path that leads from her birth in Newgate prison to her final prosperous respectability, love is regarded as worth no more than its weght in gold; and such matters as bigamy, incest, theft, and prostitution occasion but a brief blush before they are reckoned in terms of profit and losss. Yet so pure is her candor, so healthy her animal appetites, so indomitable her resilience through every vicissitude of fortune, that this extraordinary wench emerges as far more than a prototype of the mercantile mind. In "Moll Flanders" Defoe added a fresh dimension to the art of writing. "We seem to see Defoe's characters through the crytal-clear medium of his style with perfect verisimilitude, as real as if we saw them in a mirror that was so flawless that it was invisible, " writes Kennth Rexroth. Virginia Woolf ranked "Moll Flanders" as "among the few English novels which we can call indisputably great."

Virginia Woolf (1882~1941) was a novelist, critic, and essayist whose works include such classics as A Room of One's Own, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Voyage Out (the latter available from the Modern Library in both cloth and paper). 

Albert J. Rivero is Professor of English at Marquette University. He is the author of The Plays of Henry Fielding: A Critical Study of His Dramatic Career. He is the editor of New Essays on Samuel Richardson, Augustan Subjects: Essays in Honor of Martin C. Battestin, Critical Essays on Henry Fielding, and the Norton Critical Edition of Gulliver's Travels. 

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

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