Roxana, or the Fortunate Mistress

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…