The original salacious story of a bad girl who makes good These are the fortunes and misfortunes of Moll Flanders: born in Newgate Prison, 12 years a prostitute, five times a wife (once to her own brother), 12 years a thief, and eight years a transported felon in Her Majesty's colony of Virginia. Daniel Defoe's rollicking tale presents life in the prisons, alleyways, and underworlds of 18th-century London, and gives us Moll—scandalous, unscrupulous and utterly irresistible.