Moll Flanders (Signet Classics)

Moll Flanders (Signet Classics)
Daniel Defoe's extraordinary chronicle of a determined young girl's courageous rise from her poverty-stricken beginnings in 17th century England to a position of prosperous respectability. Coming to theaters everywhere in February, 1996.
Customer Review: Romance rollercoaster!
Moll Flanders is one of the few 'classic' books I have read in which a MALE author parallels the thought of a woman as the narrator. Moll Flanders is the ultimate tribute to a woman out to make a name for herself in a world of poverty, protitution, and love, who eventually learns more about her own strengths than the lessons of any morals. Moll Flanders is an embodiment of feminism... but oddly enough is written by a male author-giving the text a female and male essence of love, twists, and, of course, misfortunes.
Customer Review: Sensational, Scandalous
Moll Flanders / 0-451-52633-3 Defoe's novel, Moll Flanders, one of the first true English novels follows the "true" story of a lower-class woman who - eventually - turns to a life of petty thievery and prostitution partly as a means to live, and partly as a means to a middle-class life of relative riches and ease. This thin little novel is a fairly quick read and the story pacing moves at a quick clip as we read through the salacious and scandalous life of this matron is not particularly clever nor particularly beautiful, but she is persistent, dogged, and increasingly amoral enough to make a life for herself just above the level of extreme and desperate poverty. Through the course of her life, Moll takes several husbands, bears multiple children, and chooses to view her life with pride and detachment, rather than with the shame she 'ought' to feel. In this regard, Moll is perhaps the most modern of the historical novel characters, because she views the societal norms which would compel her to pious poverty with a jaundiced eye and recognizes that the 'shameful' things she does to survive, the gentry do on a much wider, if more socially acceptable, scale.