Moll Flanders

Born in Newgate Prison after her mother is condemned and transported, the woman later known as Moll Flanders grows up without secure family protection and learns to treat marriage, sexuality and respectability as means of survival. Her restless life carries her through service, seduction, five marriages, periods of prosperity and poverty, an unknowingly incestuous union in Virginia and repeated attempts to establish financial independence in England.

When respectable strategies fail, Moll becomes an exceptionally skilled thief until arrest returns her to Newgate and the threat of execution. Transportation to Virginia gives her another opportunity to rebuild her life, although the penitence claimed by the retrospective narrator remains morally ambiguous. The novel links personal ingenuity to the harsh structures surrounding women, property, criminal justice and colonial opportunity in seventeenth-century Britain and America.