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.