letty Fox'S remindS uS oF FortuneS and miSFortuneS oF moll Flanders, the forgotten descriptor in Defoe's title for his picaresque novel of 1721, which charts the and times of the resourceful eponymous heroine. Letty Fox, another resourceful picara, spends the years of her early majority trying to get a start in life (602) in Manhattan in the late 1930s and during the American war years. 1 Letty, by her own account, spends her time surviving the New York urban jungle: earning her living, negotiating the marriage game, and playing at radical pol- itics. Like Moll, she is a good-willed libertine and a minor swindler who is focused on pragmatic survival over romance or sensibility: don't want to be original, but I don't want to be a romantic; if I could only see clearer ahead, I'd make my way with my straight mind, for I can always look myself in the face and add and one (Stead, Letty Fox 55). Written as a rambunctious comic corrective to the domestic gothic of The Man Who Loved Children (1940) and the epic romance of For Love Alone (1944), Christina Stead's Letty Fox: Her (1946) continues to examine the terrain of female experience between the acquisition of sexual maturity and mar- riage. It is clear that the topoi of female survival and female ambition are central to this trilogy of books, and in Letty Fox: Her Luck, the framing questions of America and American politics complicate and extend these topoi. The anti-sentimental picaresque offered Stead an opportunity to return to the satirical energy that is so remarkable in House of All Nations (1938), to experiment with New York vernacular, and to anatomize various American dilemmas as she saw them: a materialistic and weak middle-class obsessed with easy success, the irritant of fake radicalism in the New York Left, and the irresistible rise and rise of gangster capitalism.2Stead's use of highlights the episodic and contingent events that make up the of her anti-heroine, but also provides a rhetorical focal point for her critique of sex and politics. Luck is a word at the heart of the novel's purpose as well as its action. Etymologically related to enticement and synonymous with chance or fortune, the idea of luck as cognate with Fortuna summons the capri- cious goddess and her wayward wheel of fortune to mind. Luck, by its very nature, is unstable, and it operates, unsurprisingly, on several semiotic and rhetorical footings in Letty Fox: for the purposes of persuasion (everyday arguments), justification, and thematization. is thematized as a range of positives and negatives in economic, sexual, and industrial spheres. Throughout the novel, good luck relates to instances and claims of success, vitality, action, impressive powers of persuasion, and good timing, while bad luck relates to the happenstance lack of power or money, bad timing, superficial powers of reflection, sexual or marital unattractiveness (or both). It is significant that Letty's specific commentary on luck ranges from complaining about the vagaries of fortune on hand to asserting that she was really a self- made and self-reliant woman after all. This is hilariously self-deluded if we take into account all the lying, swindling, manipulating, and betrayal at Letty's hands, but it does represent an importantly contradictory set of responses to the vacillating sense of power and powerlessness that aff licted the libidinal girl in twentieth-century ur- ban modernity. In this sense, of the meanings of luck-as-contingency may be that an energetic and hardworking young woman wants to be the author of her own life, desire, and texts (on her own terms, and these may not be heroic), but her ca- pacity to do this in male homo-social and political economies is subject to ongoing variation and deformation.Luck came into English from Dutch as a gambling term in the late fifteenth cen- tury, a boom time in England for roguery, vagrancy, and waywardness and its atten- dant literatures. …