Frances M. Reed, University of California, Los Angeles
[ INTRODUCTION]
For modern readers, one of the most intriguing scenes in Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders (1722) occurs during the courtship of Moll by the man who is to become her third husband. Aware that the eligible men of her day have little interest in prospective wives with small or nonexistent fortunes, Moll slyly devises a plan to keep her relative poverty a secret from the charming and (as she has every reason to believe) wealthy plantation owner who has fallen in love with her. To divert attention from her own financial condition, she repeatedly suggests that he has been courting her only for her money. Again and again he protests his love. Over and over she pretends to doubt his sincerity.
After a series of exhausting confrontations, Moll's lover begins what is to us a novel kind of dialogue:
One morning he pulls off his diamond ring and writes upon the glass of the sash in my chamber this line:
You I love and you alone.
I read it and asked him to lend me the ring, with which I wrote under it thus:
And so in love says every one.
He takes his ring again and writes another line thus:
Virtue alone is an estate.