DEFOE, Daniel.

£30,000 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

The Fortunate Mistress: Very rare first edition of Roxana, Defoe's proto-feminist novel. ESTC lists just three copies in UK institutions; only two copies have appeared at auction in the past 44 years. In Roxana and his earlier Moll Flanders, "indisputably Defoe has created two of the strongest and most important women characters in the history of literature" (ODNB). In its sympathetic portrayal of Roxana's destitution at the hands of her husband, the present work is "an important milestone, one that invited the reader not to judge the heroine for being a prostitute, but to accept that her circumstances gave her no alternative" (Rendell). It is also "the closest Defoe comes to producing what deserves to be called a novel in very nearly the full, formal sense of the term, since his narrator/heroine confronts with unsparing clarity the contradictions in her personality, coming in due course to a tortured self-understanding that is more complex in both a psychological and moral sense than that of Defoe's other narrators" (Richetti).

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