Roxana Author:Daniel Defoe Roxana, as Defoe's original title, The Fortunate Mistress, suggests, is an account of the vicissitudes of fortune of a woman, beautiful, ambitious, unscrupulous, to some extent the victim of circumstance, but on the other hand cunning enough to use both people and events to further her ambi... more »tion. She begins honestly, married to a brewer, by whom she has five children; but the marriage is disastrous, and her warning to the readers is -- "No fool, ladies, at all, no kind of fool, whether a mad fool or a sober fool, a wise fool or a silly fool; take anything but a fool; ..." Having brought them all near to bankruptcy, her husband vanishes and leaves her destitute. She abandons the children to the doubtful charity of her relations, and the care of the parish, and herself disappears. Through a series of adventures in England and the Continent she becomes first the mistress of an "honest jeweler" who is later murdered and robbed, then of a French prince, an English lord, and, it is hinted, of the king himself -- and finally marries a Dutch merchant of great integrity from whom she conceals her past life, and the existence of her children. The story leaves her in a condition of material prosperity, but worried by conscience; her later downfall is foreshadowed, pointing the moral, that a life of wickedness is attended by its own nemesis.« less