Defoe's Moll Flanders

May 1, 1722

The creator of Crusoe published another pseudo-autobiography: the confessions of a Newgate-born pickpocket who had been whore, thief, wife, and American planter, and now found religion. Readers devoured it. The English novel had added a second species: the picaresque testimony from the lower depths, told in the voice of a woman who survived.