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.