A woman alone: Allegra Goodman's Isola

Allegra Goodman’s newest novel shows how life as a young 16th-century noblewoman offers no guarantees. Not a life of wealth, not a prosperous marriage, not even a secure home.

For Marguerite de la Rocque de Roberval, heiress to a chateau in Périgord in southwestern France, her intended future is swept away after her parents’ early deaths. She’s left dependent on the whims of her guardian, an older male relative who keeps himself at a distance.

Titled after the Italian word for “island,” glimpsed by the protagonist on an Italian map of the New World, Isola is an extraordinary tale of survival. Its plotline emerges from contradictions found in several historical fragments, including an account of the real woman written by Marguerite de Navarre, the king’s sister, in her Heptaméron. This is a literary space where historical fiction can take root and flourish, as it does in this book.

Marguerite’s guardian, maritime explorer Jean-François de La Rocque de Roberval, was named the Lieutenant General of New France (now Canada) by the king, and he made the unorthodox decision to bring his ward with him on his Atlantic crossing in the 1540s, when he intended to establish a colony and promote the spread of Catholicism. After discovering her relationship with a young man aboard ship, he marooned the couple, along with her elderly servant, on a small island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

Years later, Marguerite was rescued, alone, and brought back to France. What must she have endured?

From the first few pages, the modern world dissolves, and we enter the viewpoint of Marguerite, who narrates her story from childhood on. She’s raised by her devoted nurse, Damienne, who always reminds Marguerite about the appropriate conduct for a girl of high birth. Marguerite befriends her teacher’s daughter, Claire D’Artois, whose calm gentility serves as a foil for her impulsiveness and curiosity, and they learn from one another.

We’re alongside Marguerite as she and Claire admire the feminine roles within Christine de Pizan’s City of Ladies, and we feel her confusion when they’re moved to her chateau’s North Tower after a merchant family arrives as tenants. It seems Roberval, in charge of Marguerite’s finances, has mortgaged her home to cover his own losses.

A responsible guardian would arrange his ward’s respectable marriage with the son of a noble family, but this doesn’t describe Roberval. In him, Goodman creates a multifaceted and frighteningly effective villain. He is enigmatic, unpredictable, difficult to please, and ever-watchful for fault.

So unthinkable (to any rational person) is his decision to abandon Marguerite and the man she loves on a deserted island that we feel a lurch of shock when it happens, even though we know it’s coming. Here she develops skills she’d never thought of doing herself. She draws on newfound strength—and throw off the ladylike behavior that Damienne still insists on—to feed herself and stay alive through the seasons, from the brilliant autumns through the unsparing winters and back out again. Descriptions of the terrible cold and isolation are particularly visceral: “All was white, and all was emptiness.”

Isola isn’t what you’d expect from biographical fiction about a young woman of privilege in the 1500s. “If I was in danger here,” she thinks about her island, “so I had been at home. If I could not choose my dwelling place, that had been the case before.” We can feel her self-awareness grow alongside her strength, and by the time she returns to France, which is as class-conscious as it ever was, she is forever changed by her unusual taste of unrestricted freedom.

Isola was published by The Dial Press/Penguin Random House in February 2025.