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. Roxana, one of the strongest and most important women characters in the history of literature Very rare first edition of Defoe's proto-feminist novel Roxana. ESTC lists just three copies in UK institutions; only two copies have appeared at auction in the past 44 years. 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). Octavo (192 x 115 mm). Bound in 19th-century speckled calf by Riviere, spine gilt in compartments, double gilt rules, marbled endpapers, red and blue sprinkled edges. Housed in a brown quarter morocco solander box by the Chelsea Bindery. Engraved frontispiece portrait of Roxana. Armorial bookplate of Wentworth Henry Canning, 2nd Viscount Allendale (1890-1956). Front joint with light wear and just starting at head, a few trivial marks internally, very good. Furbank and Owens 218; Rothschild 780. Rendell, Sex and Sexuality in Georgian Britain (2020); Richetti, The Life of Daniel Defoe (2005).