Roxana, or The Fortunate Mistress

I am totally amazed that no one here has started a thread on this book, so I am going to start one.

Here is a lucky young lady who started life in a reasonably prosperous bourgeois family. She was married "up" at a young age (15) to a brewer's son. She thought she loved him but discovered early in the marriage that he had many serious flaws. For a while she managed with them. In spite of his profligate spending she delayed their inevitable demise for many years -- long enough to have several children by him -- the normal course of events for a young woman in that time. Then he made them destitute and ran off by himself to leave his family to make their way in any way they could.

Thus start the adventures of our heroine.

She descends to the very depths of hell. She begs for assistance from relatives and manages to find some refuge for her young ones, but none for herself.

She finds a benefactor. She virtuously resists his onslaughts for a while and then gives in.

The rest is amazing reading. After virtue succumbs to want, and want gives way to borrowed prosperity, the rest of the novel reads like Gone With the Wind or Forever Amber. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if either or both of those modern potboilers weren't modeled after Roxana. However, Roxana keep seeking her lost virtue. Even after making her forays into society again and again -- falling in love and falling in lust, and going into higher and higher corridors of power, she still looks for the thing that is lacking -- she never quite learns to be content with herself as a powerful woman. It's her inner conflict that makes this an interesting read.

Defoe knew how to style an adventure and lead his readers into uncharted territory. I've read Moll Flanders, and I read Robinson Crusoe a bunch of times, but as Robinson Crusoe is to the adventurous world of men, so Roxana is to the smaller world of women of those times.

I haven't read this book in sooo long so can't really contribute to the topic, but, I just wanted to say, welcome to the site poem2poes! :) of the few posts of yours I've read you seem like a very astute reader and I do hope you will stick around the forums.

I just completed this work and enjoyed the social commentary that was such a part of the story as the protagonist described her circumstances and society's views of her actions, despite the practicality of what she said. It seemed much in common with the last book I read, Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilmore. I found Roxana greatly entertaining and was loathe to put it down at times as the story was quite engaged by it right up to the end. I was, however, perplexed at the ending.

Reviewing this I admit to having listened to it as an audiobook. I tend to "read " a lot of books this way as I have two jobs and little free time and my day job allows me to listen to these while I work. After this last paragraph completed, I found myself searching for the next chapter, and then, not finding it, search online for a text version to re-read it. I found it hard to believe that as good an author as Defoe would leave the reader with the story ending thus and then searched to find what I could about it to discover if it were a book that was published incomplete.

I found no such record, so I have to ask the other readers if they did not find it quite abrupt in its completion on this note. Although an allusion is made that the protagonist once again encountered Amy, we are prevented not only of hearing of the actions of any of the characters further and thus leaves us wanting so much, especially of the actions of Amy and of the fate of the daughter who had been seeking the protagonist. In that case and in conclusion, I find myself unsatisfied that Defoe chose to close the story so clumsily.

I am curious what others may think on this.

Well, you're right. Funny, it's been a while since I read this book and the peculiar lack of an ending never stuck out in my memory at all.

I just checked and found in the introduction that there were three possible endings presented to Defoe by the publisher. They all had Roxana dying in some state of repentance.

Since this was a first person history, it was not meant to be ended or concluded in any way. She would not have been able to write of her own death, and adding one would have meant changing the voice. Perhaps he meant her to be in conflict and dissatisfied with herself and her adventures until the very last pages, as life is usually lived with such internal conflict ....

That is my best guess, and it seems to be borne out by the comments I've read about the ending.

I'm glad you brought it up because the peculiar way it trailed off never struck me before as odd. It seemed appropriate to me, but it certainly would not have seemed that way to any reader in Defoe's time.