Isola

Allegra Goodman’s new novel centers around a 16th-century noblewoman who is stranded on a desert island. How will she survive and thrive?

In an author’s note following her gripping new novel, Goodman explains where her inspirations came from. In a children’s book about Jacques Cartier the explorer, she read an aside about one of Cartier’s acquaintances: “In 1542, a nobleman named Jean-François Roberval sailed separately with colonists to meet with Cartier in what is now called Canada. Roberval brought along his young ward, Marguerite de la Rocque, who annoyed him by having an affair aboard ship. Roberval marooned Marguerite and her lover on an island in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence where she managed to survive for more than two years while fighting off polar bears.”

Fascinated by this tidbit, Goodman set out to write her version of Marguerite’s story, based on historical accounts.

In it, we meet Marguerite, wealthy and landed but orphaned by age 3, alone in the world but for her pious, loving, and loyal nurse, Damienne. As Marguerite grows, her rarely present guardian, Roberval, incrementally cashes in her property and future for his own benefit. Eventually, the cruel man sets sail to claim new territory for the King and takes along terrified Marguerite and Damienne, presumably intending to claim Marguerite for himself. Aboard ship, Marguerite falls in love with Roberval’s secretary, infuriating Roberval.

The author charts Marguerite’s journey from nobly born naïf, to steely survivor, to patron of the poor. Setting Marguerite’s story of love and loss against snippets from Anne of France’s “Lessons for My Daughter” — advice from the daughter of Louis XI on how to be modest and chaste circa 1517 — Goodman underscores the cultural headwinds against which her heroine struggles to achieve autonomy and self-actualization.

Goodman writes with fluid beauty, deep empathy, and an emotional undertow that pulls you in and holds you from the first page to the last. Goodman’s sweeping page turner is at once historical and modern, intimate and epic, personal and powerful.