内容简介
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Written in a time when criminal biographies enjoyed great
success, Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders details the life of
the irresistible Moll and her struggles through poverty and sin in
search of property and power. Born in Newgate Prison to a
picaresque mother, Moll propels herself through marriages, periods
of success and destitution, and a trip to the New World and back,
only to return to the place of her birth as a popular prostitute
and brilliant thief. The story of Moll Flanders vividly illustrates
Defoe’s themes of social mobility and predestination, sin,
redemption and reward.
This Modern Library Paperback Classic is set from the 1721
edition printed by Chetwood in London, the only edition approved by
Defoe.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
作者简介
Daniel Defoe was born Daniel Foe in London in 1660. It was
perhaps, ineveitable that Defoe, an outspoken man, would become a
political journalist. As a Puritan he believed God had given him a
mission to print the truth, that is, to proselytize on religion and
politics, and in fact, he became a prolific pamphleteer satirizing
the hypocrisies of both Church and State. Defoe admired William
III, and his poem The True-Born Englishman (1701) won him the
King's friendship. But an ill-timed satire on High Church
extremists, The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, published during
Queen Anne's reign, resulted in his being pilloried and imprisoned
for seditious libel in 1703.
At fifty-nine Defoe turned to fiction, completing The Life and
Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), partly
based on the saga of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor; Moll
Flanders (1722); Colonel Jack (1722); A Journal of the Plague Years
(1722); and Roxana or the Fortunate Mistress (1724).