Daniel Defoe (c.1660-1731).
The Fortunate Mistress: Or, A History of the Life and Vast Variety of Fortunes of Mademoiselle de Beleau, Afterwards Called the Countess de Wintselsheim, in Germany, Being the Person known by the Name of the Lady Roxana, in the Time of King Charles II. London: printed for T. Warner; W. Meadows; W. Pepper; S. Harding and T. Edlin, 1724.
The very rare first edition of Defoe’s proto-feminist novel Roxana.RBH/ABPC record no copies at auction since 1977; ESTC lists just 3 copies in UK institutions.

In Roxana and his earlier Moll Flanders, ‘indisputably Defoe has created two of the strongest and most important women characters in the history of literature’ (ODNB). In its sympathetic portrayal of Roxana’s destitution at the hands of her husband, the present work is ‘an important milestone, one that invited the reader not to judge the heroine for being a prostitute, but to accept that her circumstances gave her no alternative’ (Rendell). It is also ‘the closest Defoe comes to producing what deserves to be called a novel in very nearly the full, formal sense of the term, since his narrator/heroine confronts with unsparing clarity the contradictions in her personality, coming in due course to a tortured self-understanding that is more complex in both a psychological and moral sense than that of Defoe's other narrators’ (Richetti). Rendell, Sex and Sexuality in Georgian Britain (2020); Richetti, The Life of Daniel Defoe (2005); Rothschild 780.

Octavo (192 x 115mm). Engraved frontispiece portrait (light spotting, occasional faint stains to fore-margin). 19th-century speckled calf by Riviere (light wear, head of upper joint starting).

Wentworth Henry Canning, 2nd Viscount Allendale (1890-1956; bookplate).

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