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Life After Death: Widows and the English Novel, Defoe to Austen.

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Gcvirtz Karen Bloom Life After Death: Widows and the English Novel, Defoe to Austen. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2005. 218 pp.

Midway through the famous soliloquy that constitutes the final, "Penelope" chapter of James Joyce's Ulysses, Molly Bloom muses for a moment on her own name and on the literary characters who share it, concluding her reflection with an utter rejection of association with one in particular: "I don't like books with a Molly in them like that one he brought me about the one from Flanders a whore always shoplifting anything she could cloth and stuff and yards of it" (622). Caught in Molly's memory of the books she has read is Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders, whose eponymous heroine consistently and skillfully manipulates a host of identities as rich as Molly's own inner world. Moll first assumes her most infamous pseudonym, "Mrs. Flanders," when she impersonates a rich widow after her debtor husband has fled to the continent. Widow-whore-thief: the fluid, opportunistic figure of Moll Flanders has retained her slippery, dangerous, and disreputable status far into the imaginations of twentieth- and twenty-first-century readers. As a widow--or at least, as a character who exploits the liminal status of widows during the eighteenth century by professing to be a widow--Moll figures prominently among the multitude of widows in eighteenth-century fiction to whom Karen Bloom Gevirtz's...

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