At times like this, one wishes to see the whole argument...
The feminist legal scholar Nicola Lacey argues in an op-ed that Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders represents a much different, and much more positive, attitude to female criminality than Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles:
...If Defoe's message was that redemption is always available to the penitent, he also conveys very forcefully that wit, courage and enterprise are valuable attributes for a woman.
Moll could not be a greater contrast to the stereotype of female criminality embodied in Tess. For Moll is autonomous, brimming with ambitions and strategies for pursuing them. Unlike Tess, she shapes her own destiny. A strong, active and dominant woman, Moll's world is peopled by women similar to herself. The men in this world are often weak, indecisive and passive.
Lacey's position here is apparently distilled from her most recent book. My immediate problem with this argument is that the Defoe who came up with Moll Flanders is the same Defoe who came up with Roxana, whose narrative derails quite spectacularly. And then, while Lacey quite rightly notes that Defoe found "it natural to have a sexually active, socially marginal female thief as his protagonist," which, it is true, did not happen in canonical nineteenth-century British literature, it does not follow that Moll either represents a) what Defoe valued in actual women, or b) what anyone else at the time would have valued in actual women. If you'll permit me to indulge in an undergraduatism, audiences since the dawn of time (cue James Michener's dinosaurs) have been willing to enthusiastically enjoy characters in fiction/drama/whatnot who engage in all sorts of behaviors that would not be accepted in "the real world." (Obvious contemporary example from TV: Gregory House. Or, at a much more extreme remove, Tony Soprano, Dexter, and Vic Mackey. Heck, probably any character on a daytime or prime time soap.) It's interesting that certain characters become possible or impossible at particular moments in time, but I'm a little anxious about mapping such possibilities onto lived historical experiences. Which leads me to my final qualm: the only two authors mentioned by name in either the op-ed or the book's write-up are Defoe and Thomas Hardy, both now canonical figures. But a canonical novelist is not necessarily a representative novelist (even if Defoe was a very different kind of novelist, market-wise, than Hardy). I'm not dismissing Lacey's thesis--in fact, the book sounds quite interesting--but its presentation in the op-ed seems to iron out certain literary-historical kinks. It may look different when the legal apparatus is on display...