Moll Flanders, born in Newgate Prison, becomes gentlewoman, wife, widow, whore, thief, and finally penitent, narrating her adventures with cheerful amorality. Defoe wrote this three years after Robinson Crusoe, and it is even more novelistic: episodic, picaresque, endlessly inventive. Moll survives by her wits in a world that offers women few options. The prose is plain, the morality complicated. Moll claims to repent, but we remember her triumphs. The novel is about survival, about storytelling, about the gap between what we profess and what we do.