Backscheider, Paula R. Daniel Defoe: His Life. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. An impressive compilation of all the extant archival material on Defoe’s complicated and often mysterious life.

Healy, George, ed. The Letters of Daniel Defoe. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955. The letters contain, among other things, firsthand accounts of Defoe’s spying activities in Scotland.

Novak, Maximillian E. Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. The best biography of Defoe as a thinker and writer. Novak virtually lives inside Defoe’s head and understands his intellectual and aesthetic resources as does no other biographer or critic.

Alter, Robert. Rogue’s Progress: Studies in the Picaresque Novel. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964. Important study of the mode and means of picaresque fiction.

Faller, Lincoln B. Turned to Account: The Forms and Function of Criminal Biography in Late Seventeenth- and Early-Eighteenth-Century England. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Expertly sets the background contexts for Moll Flanders and describes a range of criminal biography available to readers.

Hunter, Paul. Before Novels: Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction. New York: W. W. Norton, 1990. Indispensable study of the fictional landscape prior to Defoe and after him.

Richetti, John. Popular Fiction Before Richardson: Narrative Patterns, 1700-1739. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. A pioneering book on the variety of fiction in the literary marketplace in the early eighteenth century.

Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957. Crucial study on the evolution of the novel form in England and its relation to formal realism.

Backscheider, Paula R. Moll Flanders: The Making of a Criminal Mind. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990. A thorough review of the major issues in the novel.

Blewett, David. Defoe’s Art of Fiction. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979. An excellent general study of Defoe’s fiction.

Elliott, Robert C., ed. Twentieth Century Interpretations of Moll Flanders: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970. A useful and various compilation of modern critical material on the novel.

Faller, Lincoln B. Crime and Defoe: A New Kind of Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Applies Faller’s extensive work on criminality in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries directly to Defoe’s writings.

Hunter, J. Paul. The Reluctant Pilgrim. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966. A landmark study on the religious, confessional, and conversion narrative impulses in Defoe’s fiction.

Kay, Carol. Political Constructions: Defoe, Richardson, and Sterne in Relation to Hobbes, Hume, and Burke. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988. Contains a sophisticated chapter on Moll as a social and political woman.

McKillop, Alan Dugald. The Early Masters of English Fiction. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1956. Contains a first-rate essay on Moll.

Novak, Maximillian E. Realism, Myth, and History in Defoe’s Fiction. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983. Novak has written a number of books on Defoe, but this one contains an expansion of a famous essay, “‘Unweary’d Traveller’ and ‘Indifferent Monitor’: Openness and Complexity in Moll Flanders,” on pp. 71-98. The essay is among the most subtle explorations of the language and psychology of Defoe’s fictional style.

Pollak, Ellen. Incest and the English Novel, 1684-1814. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. A shrewd chapter on Moll and incest; Pollak’s analysis touches brilliantly on a wealth of other topics in the novel as well.

Richetti, John. Defoe’s Narratives: Situations and Structures. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. One of the best critical assessments of the way Defoe embodies cultural ideas in fiction.

Shinagel, Michael. Defoe and Middle-class Gentility. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968. A compelling study of a matter of primary concern to Defoe in most of his narratives and in many of his other works on class and culture.

Starr, G. A. Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965. A study of one of Defoe’s sub-genres, spiritual confession.

Van Ghent, Dorothy. The English Novel: Form and Function. New York: Rinehart, 1953. Still one of the strongest readings of Moll in the critical literature.

Woolf, Virginia. “Defoe.” In The Common Reader. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1925, pp. 89-97. A rich reading of Defoe’s narratives (and Moll in particular) by a critic who fully understands Defoe’s talents as a novelist.

Moore, John Robert. A Checklist of the Writing of Daniel Defoe. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1960. Moore may be overgenerous in his attributions, but he provides a sense of the extraordinary range of subjects Defoe engaged.

Novak, Maximillian E. “Daniel Defoe.” In The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature: 1660-1800, edited by George Watson. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1971, pp. 882-918. Novak is more judicious than Moore in ascribing works to Defoe.