Moll Flanders

Moll Flanders, Daniel Defoe's intriguing exploration of a woman's life of crime and redemption, is one of the best-selling novels of all time. This Norton Critical Edition is based on the 1722 first edition, the only text known to be Defoe's own. It is accompanied by detailed explanatory annotations and Albert J. Rivero's note on the novel's interesting textual history. "Contexts" reprints excerpts from eighteenth-century abridgments and continuations of the novel as well as accounts of criminal lives that were popular in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and that are a possible source for Defoe's heroine. Also included are related documents on criminal transportation and colonial laws as they applied to servants, slaves, and runaways. "Criticism" offers a wide range of commentary on the novel by Juliet McMaster, Everett Zimmerman, Maximillian E. Novak, Henry Knight Miller, lan A. Bell, Carol Kay Paule R. Backscheider, John Reitz, Ann Louise Kibbie, John Richetti, and Ellen Pollak. A Chronology of Defoe's life and work and a Selected Bibliography are also included.