Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) has inspired hundreds of stories in numerous languages and its influence persists in literary and visual culture almost 300 years later. The Robinsonade conjures up images of shipwrecked male protagonists who take command of the islands on which they are stranded. Less readily called to mind are novels which feature female castaways, despite the corpus of female Robinsonades published between 1720 and 1880 that Jeannine Blackwell has identified. The Robinsonade became phenomenally popular for British children in the nineteenth century and was harnessed as an ideal genre for didactic instruction from the eighteenth century. This chapter interrogates both female and children's Robinsonades to chart how the female Crusoe was transformed into the girl Crusoe in late Victorian fiction for girls. The girl Crusoe presents an idealized, modern femininity that differs from male examples and departs substantially from mid-Victorian children's Robinsonades, in which women are either helpless or restricted to non-glorified domestic tasks. Inspired by the necessities of maintaining the British Empire, in the late nineteenth century these fictions charge girls with the capacity to become island settlers, even if in some instances temporarily, providing impetus for twentieth-century girls’ adventure fiction.

Eighteenth-Century Female Crusoes

Women are largely absent from or marginal to most castaway narratives. Rebecca Weaver-Hightower suggests that this tendency ‘show[s] women as largely incidental to the island colonization, reflecting their political invisibility in real-world imperial society’.