Crusoe's Daughter

When Polly Flint was six she was sent to live with her two holy aunts in a yellow house close to the Irish Sea. To the lonely orphan this bleak coast of England was so isolated she might well have been marooned on an island. For Polly the world of books-especially Defoe's novel Robinson Crusoe with whose hero she will conduct a lifelong dialogue-became a source of emotional and intellectual nourishment. For her, the worlds of imagination and reality had only a thin divide between them, with the former taking the place of religion in her life. As Polly says about Crusoe: "He didn't go mad. He was brave. Stuck. Imprisoned. The only way to survive is to say it's God's will." And on that barren strip of land Polly remained for more than eighty years as the twentieth century raged; lamplight and Victorian order becoming chaos and nuclear dread. Crusoe's Daughter, wholly original, memorable and deeply satisfying, is her story.