Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress (Oxford World's Classics) Paperback – Illustrated, September 1, 2008

This work could easily deserve five stars depending on your taste and desire, but I've given it four simply because Defoe can at times be cumbersome and pedantic.Roxana serves as a novel that is more interesting to analyze than breeze through in my opinion. It deals with many intriguing themes and ideas, some which were certainly at least somewhat novel at the time of publication in 1724, such as: the desperation of poverty, the value and status of female virtue, the feared Master/Slave dichotomy of marriage, the all consuming nature of avarice, lust, vanity, and pride, and the whether repentance can be genuine or meaningful.There are a fair amount of similarities between Roxana and Moll Flanders, but Roxana deals more with the escape from poverty and marriage into what may be considered an equally morally dangerous, albeit less dismal, realm of riches and desires.A few quotes:"...that's a hard thing too, that we should judge a Man to be wicked because he's charitable; and vicious because he's kind: O Madam, says Amy, there's abundance of Charity begins in that Vice, and he is not so unacquainted with things, as not to know, that Poverty is the strongest Incentive; a Temptation, against which no Virtue is powerful enough to stand out...""In things we wish, 'tis easie to deceive;What we would have, we willingly believe.""So possible is it for us to roll ourselves up in Wickedness, till we grow invulnerable by Conscience; and that Centinel once doz'd, sleeps fast, not to be awaken'd while the Tide of Pleasure continues to flow, or till something dark and dreadful brings us to ourselves again.""That the very Nature of the Marriage-Contract was in short, nothing but giving up Liberty, Estate, Authority, and every-thing, to the Man, and the Woman was indeed, a meer Woman ever after, that is to say, a Slave. [...] I added that whoever the Woman was, that had an Estate, and would give it up to be the slave of a Great Man, that Woman was a Fool, and must be fit for nothing but a Beggar; that it was my opinion, a Woman was as fit to govern and enjoy her own Estate, without a man, as a Man was, without a woman; and that if she had a-mind to gratifie herself as to Sexes, she might entertain a Man, as a Man does a Misstress; that while she was thus single, she was her own, and if she gave away that power, she merited to be as miserable as it was possible that any Creature cou'd be.""This, however, shews us with what faint Excuses, and with what Trifles we pretend to satisfie ourselves, and suppress the Attempts of Conscience in the Pursuit of agreeable Crime, and in the possessing those Pleasures which we are loth to part with."As you can tell, the Oxford text is a facsimilie presentation of the original work down to the period-specific spelling. This does make the book harder to read at pace, but I actually enjoyed seeing the oddities and relics of written language.

You will like this book if you enjoy learning about history and different cultures across time.You might not like this book if you only read fast-paced pageturner stories.

Roxana is the young and beautiful wife of a foolish man who, after losing his business and money that he inherited from his father, abandons her with five children. For a woman in this situation in the early 18th century there are not many choices, but Roxana falls into one of the least desirable, that of a mistress. While she is quite successful, in terms of gaining a succession of wealthy benefactors, her own personal wealth and securing her financial future, it is at the expense of her relationship with her children, and their happiness as in order to embark on her career she has to first palm them off to relatives with limited resources.Defoe describes well the limited choices, and the consequences, faced by women who are abandoned and expected to make a living to survive with no employment opportunities, or help from family, the government or charity. When she manages to amass a tidy fortune and has an honourable offer of marriage, which she can accept as she understands her husband is dead, she baulks at the thought of having to give over her funds to her husband and risk being placed in the same penniless situation again and so rejects the offer.She is unable to reunite with her children and shows little interest in doing so. Through her relationships she has three or four more children and they are suitably cared for, but do not know their parents. She does not seem to regret this and while this may seem strange to our modern view it possibly reflects the high child mortality rate of the time and the author being a man rather than a mother.The book gives an insight into the difficulties faced by women and their marriages. Defoe's views on marriage come through in the narrative as well as his views on poverty and its effects on moral choices. Roxana is a strong and likeable character who makes the best she can out of her circumstances but is not sensible enough, due to vanity and greed, to change her course when given the opportunity to do so. Ultimately she regrets her choices and ends her life in misery. Roxana is an early example of a literary tragedy.

I'm not much of a reader so I wasn't really looking forward to receiving this book but I needed it for class lol. Service was excellent and it came in sooner than I expected!

I read this novel some months ago. I can recommend it to you if you like to read about aristocrats lives. Roxana wanted to be an aristicrat no matter what. She was abandoned, so, in order to survive she had to prostitute herself, but as time went by she did not realize she became a whore because of the high status-quo she was used to live.

Too dated

Not an easy read due to the phraseology. Difficult to decipher which detracted from the story. Barely finished it because it was such a struggle.

I found it very hard to read & couldn't get through it. I read books set in this era all the time but found the archaic language structure too daunting. I just don't like to re-read a sentence three times before I understand it fully.

the book arrived a day early and all is well

A fine early example of an English early novel. It suffers only by comparison with Defoe's wonderful Moll Flanders.

good value and interesting

My grandchild loved it

A couple of years ago I began concentrating in my reading matter on 'classic' English novels, written anywhere between (roughly) 1700 and 1900, and though I had read both  Robinson Crusoe (Oxford World's Classics)  and  Moll Flanders (English Library) , somehow I had not read 'Roxana, The Fortunate Mistress' at the time. And though my memories of 'Robinson Crusoe' and 'Moll Flanders' are perhaps a bit vague by now, I found this novel to be both very alike and yet also very different.'Roxana', just as 'Robinson Crusoe' and 'Moll Flanders' is a fictitious autobiography by an 'exceptional' character: we all know what befell Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders has, to say the least, an eventful life with lots of ups and as many downs, and so too Roxana. However, this is pretty much where the similarities end. Whereas for instance Robinson Crusoe could be described as 'rational man' overcoming, against all odds, whatever life (or perhaps that should be 'Nature') can throw at him and striving to better himself (both materially and morally), Roxana is quite the opposite: if anything, in countless instances the story of her life confirms over and over again how much she is led by her emotions (pride, vanity, greed, fear, etc.), knows that she does wrong but is unable to stop herself from doing so ('I sinn'd with Open Eyes'), and - looking back upon it at the (open) end of the book - there's not really a sense that Roxana has 'learned' all that much from her vast experience.And a vast experience it is! From page one the story sweeps you away and drags you along, eager to find out what will happen next. In the course of her life Roxana will go from riches to rags and back to riches, live in England, France, Italy, the Netherlands, have several husbands and children with most of those husbands, and so on and so forth. There's plenty to tell, and Roxana (we never learn her true name) tells her story at a breath-taking pace: there's no chapters, barely paragraphs, the whole story gushes forth from Roxana's pen as if she is working against some deadline, telling what she wants to tell roughly chronologically but often as not stopping mid-point by saying 'But of that hereafter' or words to that effect. There's little or no grand plan here, Roxana is an immaculate opportunist and siezes opportunity by the forelock whenever she can.Aptly enough, as this is in a way almost a sort of Morality Play about human frailty in the face of temptation, none of characters (with the exception of Roxana's constant companion, her maid Amy, and her banker Sir Robert Clayton) have names, even Roxana's husbands we only get to know as 'The Brewer', 'The Merchant from Paris', etc.Perhaps I should add - because it takes a bit of getting used to - that this edition is to such an extent true to the original first edition that all Nouns are spelled with Capitals, and that some (though not many) words are spelled as they were spelled then: people wear 'Cloaths' instead of clothes, and when Roxana reflects upon her own behaviour she does so not with horror but 'Horrour'. Lastly, as I have come to expect from the Oxford World's Classics, here too there is an excellent introduction (in this case by John Mullan) and ample explanatory notes.All in all, though Defoe will probably always be associated first and foremost with 'Robinson Crusoe', 'Roxana' is well worth the read as well! Robinson Crusoe (Oxford World's Classics)Moll Flanders (English Library)