The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders

Daniel DefoeProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 4.3
Word count
707K words
Chapters
71

Tags

English Originals World Classics Complex HumanityCriminal PsychologySocial Critique18th Century EnglandFemale Perspective

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders by Daniel DefoeAuthor: Defoe, Daniel, 1661?-1731,Language: English, Class: PR: Language and Literatures: English literature, Release Date: Dec 1, 1995

Editor's review

The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders is Daniel Defoe's second major first-person narrative after Robinson Crusoe. It follows the heroine Moll Flanders's self-narrated life, from humble origins through repeated rises and falls, touching on marriage, property, crime, and repentance, in a plain, detailed style that conveys the documentary feel and moral admonition of early fiction. Its value lies not only in its tangled plot but in its depiction of early eighteenth-century English attitudes toward women, class, and law, making it an important text for understanding the rise of the English novel. It can be read as a turbulent personal history or with attention to the narrator's subtle wavering between confession and self-justification. This is an English public-domain ebook suitable for literature students and readers interested in early English social history to read in sections.

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Reading tips

  1. Begin with the opening self-narration to grasp the narrative voice, then proceed by life stages; speed is not essential.
  2. Note the tension between the narrator's self-justification and moral judgment, and take brief notes.
  3. Read alongside background material on eighteenth-century English society to understand how marriage and law constrained women.
  4. For the English original, read first for plot, then reread for language and narrative strategy.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
  39. 39
  40. 40
  41. 41
  42. 42
  43. 43
  44. 44
  45. 45
  46. 46
  47. 47
  48. 48
  49. 49
  50. 50
  51. 51
  52. 52
  53. 53
  54. 54
  55. 55
  56. 56
  57. 57
  58. 58
  59. 59
  60. 60
  61. 61
  62. 62
  63. 63
  64. 64
  65. 65
  66. 66
  67. 67
  68. 68
  69. 69
  70. 70
  71. 71

FAQ

Is this book suitable for beginners to English literature? It can serve as supplementary reading, but it is not the easiest starting point. It is long and its sentence style is period-specific. Readers should first have some experience with English fiction, or read a Chinese translation to become familiar with the plot before tackling the English original, which makes it easier to appreciate the narrator's language.
Does the novel lean toward moral instruction? The text does carry the moral-admonition framework common in the eighteenth century, but the narrator's account is not entirely single-voiced; confession, self-justification, and repentance interweave, leaving much room for interpretation. It can be read as an admonitory story or from a social-history perspective on women's situation in marriage and law.
Does this edition include annotations or an introduction? The Project Gutenberg edition is a public-domain English ebook and generally does not include detailed scholarly annotations or an introduction; its purpose is to provide a readable text. For background explanation, read it alongside a history of English literature textbook or related scholarship to understand the early eighteenth-century social context.

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About the author

Daniel Defoe Author · British · 1660–1731

Daniel Defoe (1661?–1731) was an English novelist, political writer and journalist, and a founding figure of realist fiction in the English Enlightenment. His birth year is recorded variously; the library lists 1660, and he died in 1731. A prolific author, he is represented here by 59 works, the best known being Robinson Crusoe, alongside Moll Flanders and A Journal of the Plague Year. His novels often follow individual fortunes and adventures, written in a plain, concrete and realistic style that presents characters' circumstances and choices in unadorned narrative, and his influence on the development of English realist fiction is far-reaching. Commonly classified under inspirational growth, his works are still read today as important accounts of endurance and self-reliance.