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Moll Flanders
by Daniel Defoe
With an Afterword by Kenneth Rexroth
1964
As Moll Flanders struggles for survival amid the harsh social realities of seventeenth-century England, there is but one snare she is determined to avoid - the deadly snare of poverty.
On the twisting path that leads from her birth in New gate prison to her final prosperous respectability, love is regarded as worth no more than its weight in gold; and such matters as bigamy, and theft occasion but a brief blush before they are reckoned in terms of profit and loss.
Yet so pure is her candor, so healthy her animal appetites, so indomirable her resiliency through every vicissitude of fortune, that this extraordinary woman emerges as far more than a prototype of the mercantile mind.
In Moll Flanders, Defoe added a fresh dimension to the art of writing. "We seem to see Defoc's characters through the crystal-clear medium of his style with perfect verisimilitude, as real as if we saw them in a mirror that was so flawless that it was invisible," writes Kenneth Rexroth
Virginia Woolf ranked Moll Flanders as "among the few English novels which we can call indisputably great."
Pages have some random underlining throughout. Does not affect legibility of text. Top inch of cover page is torn out. Front cover has creasing and cracking at corners. Back cover has rubbing and discoloration. Edges and corners have some chipping and shelf wear. Fore edge of pages have some blue marks.