The Fortunate Mistress (Roxana)

’I liv’d indeed like a Queen; or if you will have me confess, that my Condition had still the Reproach of a Whore, I may say, I was sure, the Queen of Whores.’

Left destitute by her husband, the heroine of Defoe’s final novel has to choose between her virtue and her life. Choosing survival, she makes her way as a kept woman and courtesan. The Fortunate Mistress (1724), also known under the title Roxana, tells the story of how she climbs society’s ladder by dint of her own enterprise, shedding and gaining multiple identities as she moves through the worlds of business and finance, and across the trade capitals of Europe. Amassing a fortune, her taste for men and luxuries veers increasingly to the aristocratic and exotic, culminating when she dances before the King at a masquerade dressed in the garb of a Turkish Sultana--at which point she is granted the name by which she is known to history, Roxana. Despite her rise, Roxana’s past never recedes from view, and her choices eventally begin to weigh on her, prompting an excruciating self-reckoning that is only compounded as the children she has abandoned return, threatening to expose this past to public view. Defoe resists easy solutions in a sprawling and complex novel which shows an unprecedented degree of psychological realism: readers experience the interplay of circumstance, need, desire, religion, and social convention that can allow the development of a moral sense, or conspire to suppress it.

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Daniel Defoe

Marc Mierowsky is an ARC DECRA Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. He is an associate editor of The Cambridge Edition of the Correspondence of Daniel Defoe (2022) and has published essays on authors including Defoe, John Dryden, Thomas Otway, Nathaniel Lee and Philip Roth and comedians including Lenny Bruce, Joan Rivers, Sarah Silverman and Marc Maron.

Nicholas Seager is Professor of English Literature and Head of the School of Humanities at Keele University. He is the editor of The Cambridge Edition of the Correspondence of Daniel Defoe (2022), and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Daniel Defoe (OUP, 2023) and of The Cambridge Companion to Gulliver’s Travels (2023). He has written essays on authors including John Bunyan, Eliza Haywood, Laurence Sterne, Oliver Goldsmith, and Samuel Johnson.