[ book tip by Ann Morgan ] Some time around the beginning of the eighteenth century, story-telling changed. It didn’t happen all at once – these things rarely do – but steadily and irrevocably narrative poems and religious tracts such as John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress gave way to gallows pamphlets, delineating the lives of condemned criminals in grizzly detail. These grew more and more fantastic until, in 1722 with the publication of Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, the novel was born. 

Drawing heavily upon the traditions which it now overshadows, Defoe’s romp through the scandalous life of his heroine Moll is part confession, part spiritual biography and part salacious bonk-buster. Narrated in the first person, and set up in the fictional ‘Preface’ as a ‘Genuine… private History’, the book tackles head-on the questions of authenticity and authorial responsibility thrown up by works such as James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces written some three hundred years on. Even at its inception, the novel-form hopscotched back and forth across the line between fact and fiction, teasing the reader with the possibility that what it contained may or may not be true. This ambiguity will strike some readers as unsettlingly post-modern. Yet it is also a reminder that story-telling and the novel as we know it today has its roots very firmly in the business of the everyday. Stories were told – have always been told – to achieve something, to do something, to evoke a response. It is a lesson many writers would do well to remember.  

[ book info ] Defoe, Daniel: Moll Flanders. (original language: English) Penguin Classics, 1989 (1722).