In his story of a woman born and bred in the murky stews of seventeenth-century London, Defoe created an immortal heroine and one of the sharpest portraits ever of how a society worked - from a woman’s-point of view...

In his story of a woman born and bred in the murky stews of seventeenth-century London, Defoe created an immortal heroine and one of the sharpest portraits ever of how a society worked - from a woman’s-point of view.

Abandoned at six months old, Moll has no option but to use her considerable wit and looks to make her way in a world where no mercy is given to the unadaptable. As a woman her options are limited and Moll embarks on a rollicking career of incest, bigamy and crime. Five times married, a whore and a thief, her business is survival - and survive she does, both a prisoner and manipulator of her circumstances, whose timely spiritual regeneration in prison is, she tells us, ’the best part of the story’.

Readers must decide for themselves. Tough, resourceful, indisputably feminine, Moll’s voice speaks to us across the centuries with shocking familiarity.