Roxana
Almost three hundred years after its first publication, Roxana continues to challenge readers, who, though compelled by Roxana’s story, are often baffled by her complex relationships to her children, her fortune, and her vices. As one of Daniel Defoe’s four major fictions, Roxana has long been understood as central to the history of the novel,…
The Widow Ranter
In her final play, Aphra Behn looks across the Atlantic and reimagines Bacon’s Rebellion, the notorious revolt whose participants took up arms against the government of colonial Virginia with the aim of driving the Indigenous population from the region. Heavily fictionalized and featuring a memorable cast of both heroic and comic characters, Behn’s long-neglected tragicomedy…
Moll Flanders
Born to a petty thief in London’s notorious Newgate prison and determined to make her way in a rapacious and materialistic society, Moll Flanders recounts the “fortunes and misfortunes” of her turbulent life in this 1722 novel. Though Moll Flanders was shaped by the conventions of criminal biography, Defoe also drew on other literary traditions…