Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress Or, a History of the Life and Vast Variety of Fortunes of Mademoiselle De Beleau, Afterwards Called the Countess De wintselshei (Oxford World's Classics)

Rating:
Summary: A way with words
Review: Daniel Defoe has a way with words, lovely piece of words. I would advise you to read this book slowly to eat up the words.

Rating:
Summary: Defoe, an early feminist?
Review: I read this having recently enjoyed Moll Flanders. They are very different, Moll's story is something of a bawdy, satirical comedy, whereas Roxana's is a tragic tale. I think that other reviewers have perhaps missed the irony that is inherent in Defoe's work. While presenting these tales of 'fallen' women as confessions of repentence, I think that was something of a cover, without which his novels would have been unacceptable to his contemporary audience. He creates strong, autonomous women, driven by economics. He does not judge them and because of that neither do we. Was he in fact an early feminist? He believed strongly in the education of women and advocated equality in marriage in 'Conjugal Lewdness.' I think Roxana is an extention of those ideas.

Rating:
Summary: A woman's place?
Review: Told in the first person, this is the tragic story of the life of the social climbing Roxana - it reads (as I suppose it was intended to read) as a guilt-ridden confession.

Abandoned (with her five children) by her profligate and irresponsible husband, Roxana rises to wealth by a series of affairs with well-connected men. Not to give away the ending, but the achievement of wealth does not result in anything like happiness.

Due to the way she was treated, Roxana has a highly critical view of marriage, and advocates equal rights for women. Although he puts such opinions in Roxana's mouth, Defoe makes it clear that (for the time) these were extreme views - Roxana goes too far in her cynicism and amorality. I thought that Defoe's point was that women should be treated far more humanely than they were, but not that they should be treated as equals.

Defoe also explores interesting issues surrounding the moral effects of both extreme poverty and great wealth: "... for tho' Poverty and Want is an irresistible Temptation to the Poor, Vanity and Great Things are as irresistible to others..."

In the edition I was reading, the editor had done his best to maintain Defoe's original spelling and style. You have therefore to put up with the peculiarities and inconsistencies of Defoe's grammar and spelling. Either you're into this or you're not, but I prefered it that way. The lack of chapters or other breaks in the text was a bother: I don't know enough about the literature of Defoe's time to judge whether that was normal, or whether Defoe deliberately avoided the use of such "artificial" stylistic devices in order to maintain the feeling that this was someone giving her confession. Unless you're able to sit down and read the novel at one sitting (I wasn't) it means that you have to judge carefully when to create your own breaks.

Although "Roxana" had plenty of points of interest, I felt that it was over-long. Defoe had made his case long before the end, and although the ending is shocking and tragic, the pathway there could have been shorter.