'What Rees does in this engaging book is to give us the extra historical information we need to create a richer context for Moll's story' The Guardian 'Lively and bracing... With Rees's companionship, I finally see the point of Moll' The Times 'Ably and entertainingly Rees pictures Moll's world of Stuart London. She traces the sources of her remarkable story and the overlaps between Defoe's life and that of his heroine. This is a readable, informative and colourful account' Daily Express 'Rees is a lucid, intelligent guide' Sunday Herald Daniel Defoe's fictional heroine Moll Flanders is famous for her criminal and sexual adventures, racily portrayed in big and small screen romps as bawdy wench, fallen woman and proto-feminist trailblazer. But who was she? And what world did she really inhabit? To answer these questions Sian Rees takes her readers on a journey of literary and historical detection, across continents, cultures and centuries. Following Moll's tumultuous life, the story moves from Jacobean England to Jamestown, Virginia; from the English Civil War to the struggles of the Powhatan Indians; and from the metropolis of London to the hamlet of Annapolis in the early eighteenth century. Introducing us to a rogues' gallery of real-life versions of Moll, it is as fast-moving and rich in incident as Defoe's great novel.

Author Biography

Sian Rees was born and brought up in Cornwall, spending much of her childhood in boatyards and at sea. She read Modern History at Magdalen College, Oxford and then spent a decade travelling and living abroad. Her first book, The Floating Brothel: the extraordinary true story of the Lady Julian and its cargo of female convicts bound for Botany Bay was written after living in Melbourne, Australia, and published in 2001. It was followed by The Shadows of Elisa Lynch: how a nineteenth-century Irish courtesan became the most powerful woman in Paraguay (2003) after a stint in South America, and The Ship Thieves: the true tale of James Porter, colonial pirate (2006). Her next publication, Sweet Water and Bitter: the Ships that Stopped the Slave Trade, will be published by Chatto & Windus in February 2009. She lives in Brighton with her two small sons.