The world is so taken up of late with novels and romances that it will be hard for a private history to be taken for genuine where the names and other circumstances of the person ate concealed; and on this account we must be content to leave the reader to pass his own opinion upon the ensuing sheets and take it just as he pleases.

  The author is here supposed to be writing her own history, and in the very beginning of her account she gives the reasons why she thinks fit to conceal her true name, after which there is nooccasion to say any more about that...

In MOLL FLANDERS, we meet one of the most lively,convincing and delightful rogues in literature. From her birth in Newgate Prison to her final position of wealth and stature, Moll Flanders demonstrates a mercantile spirit and an indomitable will. Moll judges theft,prostitution and bigamy only in terms of their potential profit, for she will stop at nothing to overcome her background of impoverishment.

The first author to combine the common criminal biography and the picaresque novel, Daniel Defoe created not a classical heroine but a high-spirited,flesh-and-blood woman, determined to survive in the hostile environment of sooty, bustling seventeenth-century London. This outrageous fictional memoir is a work of genius and an important step in the evolution of the novel.

  Virginia Woolf praised MOLL FLANDERS as one of the "few English novels which we can call indisputably great." A work filled with irony, written in plain, terse and readable prose, MOLL FLANDERS is a literary touchstone.