Moll: The Life and Times of Moll Flanders

A journey of literary and historical detection, across continents, cultures and centuries, to uncover the fictional personality of Defoe's Moll Flanders.
 
Daniel Defoe's fictional heroine Moll Flanders is famous for her criminal and sexual adventures, racily portrayed on big and small screens. But who was she? And what world did she really inhabit?
 
To answer these questions Moll takes its readers on a journey of literary and historical detection, across continents, cultures and centuries. Following Moll's tumultuous life, the story moves from Jacobean England to Jamestown, Virginia; from the English Civil War to the struggles of the Powhatan Indians; from the English Restoration to Maryland's slave-worked tobacco farms; and from the metropolis of London to the hamlet of Annapolis in the early eighteenth century. Introducing us to a rogues' gallery of real-life versions of Moll, it is as fast-moving and rich in incident as Defoe's great novel.

SIAN REES's acclaimed historical works include the best-selling The Floating Brothel; The Shadows of Eliza Lynch; The Ship Thieves and most recently Sweet Water and Bitter: the Ships that Stopped the Slave Trade. She lives in Brighton.