It made you realize just how much women were repressed during that time period, how much things have changed, and how much we still have to go. Moll always landed on her feet but had to be a quick thinker and had good friends.

Indisputably boring

I read the Norton edition, which had notes and a million references, which I loved and helped to "be there". To me, this is an important view of a time - a man wrote about a woman's life. Moll Flanders portrayed every aspect of what could happen to a woman and the consequences of very human decisions.

The attitude at the time (the time?) that women are above the outside life and are pure. That view is obviously on purpose. He's talking about reality, and how a woman is smart and can influence her own life no matter how brutal the circumstances.

I think this is brilliant that a man wrote this, but he meant it as an allegory. Which is fine. This is even before the 18th century french salons where women ruled the intellectual life of the elite.

Don't underestimate the 18th century, y'all...:)

I have at least a passing interest in "Banned Books"—enough to seek them out and drink my morning coffee out of a mug celebrating them. The stories surrounding what leads authors or their stories to be censored are often as fascinating as the stories themselves. Which leads me to a simple question: How have I never seen "Moll Flanders" on such lists?

Let's look at two titles and try and guess which one makes the ALA list of challenged books more often: (1) "The Bluest Eye," and (2) "Moll Flanders: Who was Born in Newgate, and During a Life of Continued Variety for Threescore Years, Besides her Childhood, was Twelve Year a Whore, Five Times a Wife (Whereof Once to Her Own Brother), Twelve Year a Thief, Eight Year a Transported Felon in Virginia, at Last Grew Rich, Lived Honest, and Died a Penitent."

Remember, our goal is to guess which one frequently gets challenged as being obscene.

Moll Flanders spares few details about death, incest, abortion, crime, or prostitution in the British Empire. Toni Morrison's "The Bluest Eye" looks at a few of these areas, but despite (my humble opinion) being a better novel, Morrison's novel continues to make banned book lists while Daniel Defoe's doesn't.

Perhaps this is a Streisand effect? Perhaps newer books have ideas that haven't finished shaping public consciousness, whereas older books already ran their course and no longer mandate pearl clutching?

The Moll Flanders Wikipedia page does currently suggest: "Historically, the book was occasionally the subject of police censorship," and backs this up by citing Peter Coleman's "Censorship: Publish and Be Damned." When I followed the footnote trail, the article had a passing comment about Moll Flanders as being banned by the Australian Customs Department prior to 1933, but a panel of scholars recommended the book be allowed in. The footnote for this claim cites Coleman's out-of-print "Obscenity, Blasphemy, Sedition: 100 Years of Censorship in Australia," so there's a dead end.

New strategy: the Wikipedia page for "Book censorship in the United States" does list Moll Flanders and points to the UPenn Library Online Books "Banned Books" page (good so far). But the full quotation is:

John Cleland's Fanny Hill ... has been frequently suppressed since its initial publication in 1749. The story of a prostitute is known both for its frank sexual descriptions and its parodies of contemporary literature, such as Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders. The U.S. Supreme Court finally cleared it from obscenity charges in 1966.

So that's not quite right. The referenced 1966 case was Memoirs v. Massachusetts, where the decision appears to be narrowly tailored toward overturning a lower court's decision to permit Fanny Hill being banned. Censoring a book parodying Moll Flanders is also not the same thing as censoring Moll Flanders.

It's strange how inconclusive this search was when I paid a tiny bit of attention to the footnotes. There's enough evidence here for me to mentally file this alongside the rest of the banned books I've read (or: the cost I pay for mislabeling this is basically zero). Maybe I can revisit this if I ever find a good book on the history of censorship practices.

Wait, where was I? Oh right, reviewing "Moll Flanders?"

History outside the book aside, you can get the gist of the history inside the book from the title alone. Daniel Defoe positions this as if it were a biographical novel where Moll Flanders recounts her entire life. The story is told as if from memory—and like memories, some parts of a life are full of detail and sometimes entire years slip by in a fog of sadness.

There are a few main sections that the full title hints at, but my edition had a disorienting lack of chapter breaks. My first sitting with this book seemed to stretch on longer than I expected, and when I flipped through to find the next break I found the end of the novel instead. With a 1722 publication date, this is the oldest novel I've read to date (actually, the oldest thinigs I've read seem to be Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and Shakespeare's plays), so I'm not experienced enough to know whether this was a stylistic choice Defoe made or if chapters literally had not been invented yet.

My overall feeling was that this was just okay though. It was like reading a person's diary—there were some twists in the same manner that life can take unexpected turns, but an egocentric focus on Moll's life left out what I like best in stories: other characters and a conflict driving the narrative forward.

Sometimes I just miss the eighteenth century. Not in a way that can be assuaged by contemporary historical fiction; in a way that can only really be dealt with by reading a novel rife with variant spellings like "chuse" and the persistent Capitalisation of every Noun, for Reasons. Daniel Defoe and I have a vexed history - the first of his novels that I ever read was Robinson Crusoe, which bored me almost to tears, although possibly this was because I was eight years old and not equipped to find interest in Crusoe's devotion to the Protestant ethic through list-making, material culture, and stewardship of resources. Moll Flanders, though, I've always got on well with. She narrates her own story with vim, and an almost total lack of shame: her initial fall from grace, a seduction by the son of a woman in whose house she lives as a companion, is something about which she expresses regret, but mostly because she doesn't "manage" the affair well and fails to get a promise of marriage and security. "Management" is essential in Moll's world; the word crops up again and again. It's interesting to consider its use as set against the idea of household management as a married woman's primary duty; for Moll, "managing" is also a matter of maximising efficiency, but in her case it is the efficiency of graft, or theft, or of the socially approved form of prostitution that constitutes the marriage market. It's also interesting to see how long it takes her to fall to actual crime: for most of the novel, she might be considered immoral (making various marriages for money and advantage, including the notorious incestuous one), but she doesn't do much that's illegal. The career of thieving comes much later, at a point where she's not sufficiently sure of her own youth and beauty to try marrying again. The other delightful thing about the novel, of course, is that she ends up all right, with a husband she likes and a large, regular income from a plantation in Virginia. Roxana, a later Defoe novel, explores the darker and more realistic consequences of being a fallen woman, but Moll Flanders is like a glorious fantasy of transgression. I've always rather liked it for that.

So boring. I loved Robinson Crusoe and thought that I would like this as well, but I was just awful.

While Defoe's writing style is extremely easy to non-stuffed shirt lit types, the character of Moll left me raging. Moll was a hollow, ridiculously written character with zero backbone or morals. Truly Defoe wanted his audience to walk away with a low opinion of women.

I adore this book. There is simply no other way to say it. It is exceptionally saucy, especially for the time it was written in. It’s all drama and action, and it’s just fun. It’s a look into the criminal life of a woman, a look at the usage of “womanly wiles,” and attempts at redemption. The book used to come bound in red rope, to warn people of its X-rated content, which I find endlessly entertaining.

Defoe’s personal beliefs that the status of women should be elevated are evident in the character of Moll. Even when she is acting her most despicable, he never fails to show her desperation and fear, giving the impression that she had no other way out. Certainly there was much to learn, and a lot of great quotes, in this scandalous adventure.

Plus the book gets my personal award for best title ever: “The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, &c. Who was Born in Newgate, and during a Life of continu'd Variety for Threescore Years, besides her Childhood, was Twelve Year a Whore, five times a Wife (whereof once to her own Brother), Twelve Year a Thief, Eight Year a Transported Felon in Virginia, at last grew Rich, liv'd Honest, and died a Penitent. Written from her own Memorandums.”
They just don’t title things like they used to. Pity.

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