Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe (1722)

What does survival look like when morality becomes a luxury? In this episode, we dive into Moll Flanders, Daniel Defoe's scandalous, slippery tale of a woman who refuses to be ruined by the world she's born into. Through crime, marriage, abandonment, and reinvention, Moll narrates her own rise and fall with unsettling candor, forcing us to question where blame really lies—on individual vice or social necessity. We'll explore why the novel feels part confession, part economic case study, and part moral experiment, and how Defoe uses realism to blur the line between repentance and rationalization. It's a story about agency, gender, and money—and why respectability has always been harder to earn than survival.