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Books Like Moll Flanders
Best books to read after Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders is the first major novel about a female protagonist in English — a picaresque first-person account of Moll's five marriages, her career as a thief, her transportation to Virginia, and her eventual prosperity. These recommendations extend the experience through Defoe's other work and through fiction about female survival and resourcefulness.
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Buy on AmazonRobinson Crusoe
by Daniel Defoe
The companion novel — the male survival story to Moll's female one, organized around the same documentary realism and the same calculating protagonist who assesses every situation pragmatically. Reading Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders together gives the full range of Defoe's achievement.
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Buy on AmazonA Journal of the Plague Year
by Daniel Defoe
Defoe's documentary account of the 1665 London plague is the third pillar of his achievement — the most formally sophisticated of his works and the most ambitious in its use of documentary realism to recreate a collective experience.
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Buy on AmazonRoxana
by Daniel Defoe
Defoe's 1724 novel about a woman who uses sexual relationships with wealthy men to build financial independence is Moll Flanders's most direct companion in Defoe's work — darker in tone, more psychologically complex, and ending more ambiguously.
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Buy on AmazonPamela
by Samuel Richardson
Richardson's 1740 novel about a servant girl who resists her employer's advances is both Moll Flanders's immediate successor in the female-protagonist tradition and its moral opposite — where Moll is pragmatic and amoral, Pamela is earnestly virtuous and is rewarded accordingly.
- 5Buy on Amazon
The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders
by Daniel Defoe
The full title of Moll Flanders reminds us that it is a picaresque novel in the tradition of Lazarillo de Tormes and Gil Blas — episodic, organized around the protagonist's adventures rather than a single plot, and committed to the full range of social experience from the lowest to the highest.
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Buy on AmazonTom Jones
by Henry Fielding
Fielding's 1749 comic picaresque novel is the contemporary rival to Moll Flanders in the tradition of the episodic adventure novel — male instead of female, comic instead of documentary, and narrated from outside rather than from within, but equally organized around a protagonist who survives by their wits.
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Buy on AmazonThe Crimson Petal and the White
by Michel Faber
Faber's 2002 novel about Sugar, a Victorian prostitute in 1870s London, is the most ambitious contemporary successor to Moll Flanders's tradition — a documentary-realistic, deeply researched portrait of a woman who uses her intelligence and her body to survive in a world that offers women no other resources.
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Buy on AmazonHalf of a Yellow Sun
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Adichie's 2006 novel about the Biafran War is organized around women's survival under extreme circumstances in a way that shares Moll Flanders's fundamental commitment to the intelligence and resilience of women in impossible situations — though the circumstances are historically specific and political in a way that Defoe's novel is not.
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