Roxana, o la cortesana afortunada

At fifteen, with a dowry of 2,000 pounds, the heroine of this novel marries the useless son of a City of London brewer. Her summary of the experience goes something like this: “No idiots, ladies… Choose anything… rather than marry an idiot.” Abandoned by her husband, she finds herself “with five children and not a penny to feed them.” In such circumstances, the unexpected attentions of her landlord lead to an increasingly ambiguous situation. Then come a German prince, a Dutch merchant, the King of England himself… and a brilliant career filled with secrets, threats, escapes, crimes, and money. Roxana, or the Fortunate Courtesan (1724), unpublished in Spanish until now, narrates with unusual vigor and precocious clarity the story of a woman who refuses to be a slave to men and who establishes her own business outside of marriage: “I dare say that no other woman ever had a life like mine: twenty-six years of depravity without the slightest remorse… and without the slightest intention of putting an end to it.” Like all of Defoe’s novels, this one is a precursor to modern techniques and perspectives, but it is also a precursor to the most eloquent feminist thought. For Virginia Woolf, it is “one of the few English novels that can be considered indisputably great.”