Moll Flanders / Daniel Defoe

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If reading and re-reading the Classics is a joy, so is publishing select titles. It is a great pleasure to present the most scintillating and incisive account of how the 17th century English society treated its outcasts, the convicts, and the fallen women, in Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders, written when fiction itself was an experiment and a novelty!
Facing the rigid orthodoxy, a daughter of a convict maintains anonymity in her colloquial narrative. In spite of prevalent high mortality in the neglected children, she survives, and is fortunate to find care in the hands of a perish. She becomes a maid in the times when even the cloth was a luxury. A long spell of seductions, marriages, and quickly forgotten children then follows. Faced with a death sentence, she crosses the seas to Virginia, where the convicts exercise an option to be transported to, as an alternative to the gallows. She undergoes the shocks of incest, and emotional pains as she indulges in theft and prostitution. Finally, she is lucky to overcome the middle age, and eventually finds prosperity in her last, stable, marriage, albeit in deep remorse and penitence.