Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders

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Saying "This Novel Is Controversial"

...is like saying "Soup is hot."


Daniel Defoe wrote it in 1722,
three years after writing
Robinson Crusoe.


Father's Day was yesterday.

Today, a genuine Founding Father
of  Novels written in English
is featured on this page.


But the voice of  Moll Flanders
is the fictional autobiography
of a woman. 


However, a fistful of quotes
from the novel begins with
the author's preface
italicized. 




When a woman debauched from her youth...gives an account of all her vicious practices and all 
the progressions of crime which she ran through in threescore years, an author must be hard put 
to wrap it up so clean as to not give room, especially for vicious readers, 
to turn it to his disadvantage.

In relating the penitent part [vis-a-vis] the criminal part...the difference lies not
in the real worth of the subject as in the gust and the palate of the reader.

Nobody can write their own life to the full end of it 
unless they can write it after they are dead.
***

The temptation of necessity is the general introduction of all wickedness.

I had a most unbounded stock of vanity and pride but a very little stock of virtue.

The fear of not being married at all and of that frightful state of life called an old maid
is nothing but the lack of courage.

When a woman is left desolate and void of counsel, she is just like a bag of money
or a jewel dropped on the highway, which is prey to the next comer.

The busy devil that drew me in had too fast hold of me to let me go back.
But as poverty brought me in, so avarice kept me in,
till there was no going back.

Poverty hardens the heart.

A man so heated by wine in his head and a wicked gust in his inclination...
is in possession of two evils at once, and can no more govern himself
by reason than a mill can grind without water.


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Footnotes
The image is from here.

That hyperlink will also give you access to the complete text of Moll Flanders. 
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