Moll Flanders

Published in 1722, this novel is the first-person record of a woman born in Newgate who lives by her wits in Restoration and early-eighteenth-century England and the American colonies. Moll takes a succession of husbands and lovers, some bigamous, and turns to theft in London when respectability fails. She moves between service, marriage, Newgate, transportation, and plantation life in Virginia, always calculating money, name, and the next disguise. The narrative presents itself as a repentance written in later comfort, while remaining a catalogue of crimes and bargains. The book is a picaresque criminal autobiography, not a courtship novel.

Bound in orange cloth blocked with a green design. Black leather spine label. Grey slipcase.