Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress - Softcover

Defoe, Daniel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0451511905 ISBN 13: 9780451511904

Publisher: Signet Classics, 1979

Synopsis

Roxana (1724) was Defoe's last novel. It is a fascinating work, simultaneously strange and tragic, which dramatizes the moral deterioration and degradation of its complex heroine. Mlle Beleau, or Roxana as she becomes known, enters upon a career as a courtesan. She passes from one protector to another in England, France and Holland and amasses much wealth. But she is fatally torn between the dull virtue of middle-class respectability and the evil attractions of the beckoning city lights.

The only one of Defoe's novels that does not end with the triumph of its protagonist, Roxana is nevertheless a triumphant work of art. It is of enormous historical and social interest, highlighting as it does the complex relationship that existed in Defoe's time between public respectability and private corruption.

About this title

From the Back Cover

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, and provides readers with Defoe’s sharpest and most specific commentary on the complexities of life in seventeenth-century London. This edition offers a range of contemporary documents that will help readers understand the struggles of Roxana’s life as series of metaphoric engagements with pressing issues of her time.

About the Author

Daniel Defoe was born Daniel Foe in London in 1660. It was perhaps ineveitable that Defoe, an outspoken man, would become a political journalist. As a Puritan he believed God had given him a mission to print the truth, that is, to proselytize on religion and politics, and he became a prolific pamphleteer satirizing the hypocrisies of both Church and State. Defoe admired William III, and his poemThe True-Born Englishman (1701) won him the King's friendship. But an ill-timed satire on High Church extremists, The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, published during Queen Anne's reign, resulted in his being pilloried and imprisoned for seditious libel in 1703. 

At fifty-nine Defoe turned to fiction, completing The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe(1719), partly based on the saga of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor; Moll Flanders (1722); Colonel Jack (1722);A Journal of the Plague Years (1722); and Roxana or the Fortunate Mistress (1724).

Edition details

• Publisher: Signet Classics
• Publication date: 1979
• ISBN 10: 0451511905
• ISBN 13: 9780451511904
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 304