Moll Flanders (1722)

These are the true confessions of a remarkable and passionate young woman are thought to have been based on the adventures of a real prisoner in Newgate where Moll was born. ostensibly written as a warning to wrongdoers, the moral of Defoe's candid and cautionary tale is often lost in the sheer vitality of Moll - one of the supreme characters of English comic fiction. Her fortunes and misfortunes - 'twelve years a Whore, five times a Wife (once to her own brother), twelve years a Thief, eight years a transported Felon' - plunge the reader into the exciting world of the eighteenth-century low life.