Castaway: Isola by Allegra Goodman
A 2025 novel offers a vivid portrait of a sixteenth-century French noblewoman marooned out of spite on a rocky, remote island.
What if the shipwrecked Robinson Crusoe had been a woman? The novel Isola, published in 2025 by Allegra Goodman, gives us a partial answer to that question. Like Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, the new novel takes off from historical anecdotes. Whereas Crusoe elaborated on the case of Alexander Selkirk, marooned on an uninhabited Pacific island from 1704 to 1709, Isola develops a story about French noblewoman Marguerite de la Rocque de Roberval, deliberately left on an uninhabited island at the mouth of the St. Lawrence River by colonial explorers in 1542.