In the Library
Moll Flanders
Daniel Defoe, 1722
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 10 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 2
- Length
- Length 138k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
My true name is so well known in the records or registers at Newgate, and in the Old Bailey.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Vanity Fair
William Makepeace Thackeray
Becky Sharp claws her way through the same marriage market with Moll's cold arithmetic, but never once confesses a sin along the way.
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Pablo de Segovia, the Spanish Sharper
Francisco de Quevedo
Quevedo's Pablos tells his own life of thefts, disguises and failed respectability in the first person, the Spanish picaresque that Defoe's English rogue grew out of.
£1.99
History of My Life
Giacomo Casanova
Casanova writes out his seductions, card tables and prison escapes with the same unashamed bookkeeping of pleasure and profit that keeps Moll's confession so alive.
£1.99
About the book
Newgate prison, and a woman condemned to hang for theft is spared because she is pregnant; the child born in that cell will spend the rest of her life outrunning the sentence handed to her at birth. Daniel Defoe lets Moll Flanders tell it all herself, in her own unblinking arithmetic: what each husband was worth, what each theft paid, what a woman with no name, no family, and no protection actually needs to survive a world built to use her up. She marries five times, once unknowingly to her own brother, a marriage undone only after two children and an ocean already crossed, then turns to theft with a precision that makes her the best in London, until she is caught at last and sentenced to hang in the very gaol that bore her. What astonishes isn't the scandal, it's the voice behind it: never ashamed, never sentimental, totting up love and sin and survival like a ledger that must balance by nightfall, and daring you to judge her for getting it to add up.