Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress (Oxford World's Classics)

by Daniel Defoe (Author), Daniel Defoe (Author), Daniel Defoe (Author), John Mullan (Editor)

• Used

  Paperback
  1998

  $3.28

  Roxana (1724), Defoe's last and darkest novel, is the autobiography of a woman who has traded her virtue, at first for survival, and then for fame and fortune. Its narrator tells the story of her own 'wicked' life as the mistress of rich and powerful men. A resourceful adventuress, she is also an unforgiving analyst of her own susceptibilities, who tells us of the price she pays for her successes. Endowed with many seductive skills, she is herself seduced: by money, by dreams of rank, and by the illusion that she can escape her own past. Unlike Defoe's other penitent anti-heroes, however, she fails to triumph over these weaknesses. The novel's drama lies not only in the heroine's 'vast variety of fortunes', but in her attempts to understand the sometimes bitter lessons of her life as a 'Fortunate Mistress'. Defoe's achievement was to invent, in 'Roxana', a gripping story-teller as well as a gripping story. This edition uses the rare first edition text, with a new introduction, detailed notes, textual history, and a map.

• Used

  Paperback
  1998

  $3.28

  The only 1 of Defoe's protagonists who meets an unfortunate end. Deserted by her rakish husband, the beautiful Roxana abandons poverty, morality and her 5 children and embarks on a career of sexual intrigue and fraud in England, France and Netherlands. A 2nd marriage to a jeweller leaves her widowed, but Roxana climbs to a state of great social importance through a series of increasingly grand affairs. However, she tires of her opulent lifestyle and attempts to put it behind her, only to find that she has employed in her own household a daughter that she had abandoned many years previously. The girl's determination to force her mother to acknowledge her threatens to expose Roxana's dissolute past, something which Roxana does not want revealed at any price...

• New

  Paperback
  1982

  $14.08

  Beautiful, proud Roxana is terrified of being poor. When her foolish husband leaves her penniless with five children, she must choose between being a virtuous beggar or a rich whore. Embarking on a career as a courtesan and kept woman, the glamour of her new existence soon becomes too enticing and Roxana passes from man to man in order to maintain her lavish society parties, luxurious clothes and amassed wealth. But this life comes at a cost, and she is fatally torn between the sinful prosperity she has become used to and the respectability she craves. A vivid satire on a dissolute society, Roxana (1724) is a devastating and psychologically acute evocation of the ways in which vanity and ambition can corrupt the human soul.