The English writer Daniel Defoe has gone down in literary history as the author of one world-famous book, The Life and Strange and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, York Mariner (1719). However, this prolific author, who wrote in a variety of genres, wrote more than 550 works, including a number of picaresque novels about the lower classes of English society in his time and earlier eras.

The Joys and Sorrows of the Famous Moll Flanders (1722) is Defoe's fifth novel, containing a bittersweet account of the fate of a London thief and prostitute, the main events of which are outlined on the book's title page. Presented as authentic notes from 1689, this self-incriminating confession by the protagonist, who hid behind the pseudonym Moll Flanders ('The Flemish Harlot'), paints a story of desperate struggle for existence and moral decline that nearly led the narrator to the gallows but ended with the discovery of a 'quiet haven' on a Virginia plantation. The extraordinary accuracy of its everyday scenes led the English historian J. M. Trevelyan, author of The Social Life of England, to call Moll Flanders 'an imaginary reportage of the everyday life of the era.'