Sanderson holds a master of fine arts degree in fiction writing and is an independent writer. In this essay, she argues that Defoe wrote his novel less as a book addressing Moll's soul and more as an entertaining book addressing Moll's social and economic success.

In Defoe's Moll Flanders, mind-boggling things happen to the book's heroine: events align to create amazing coincidences; consequences that might prove pesky in future episodes simply disappear; the heroine freely employs disguises and changes her name; and, though numerous trials and tribulations befall her, the heroine still rises above the fray to become a success. Sound familiar?

Give Moll a different set of clothes and move her to an anonymous mid-sized American city, and you have the basis for a character in a hugely successful soap opera. Defoe's novel, an enormously popular success in eighteenth-century England, is a story with a two-faceted...