Orphan Island

By Rose Macaulay

1924

First Published

3.38

Average Rating

322

Number of Pages

9H49M

Audio Length

In 1855 a philanthropic young person, Miss Charlotte Smith, was escorting forty orphans to San Francisco when the ship was wrecked, and the survivors-Miss Smith, the orphans, a doctor, and some others, landed on a desert island. Those sailors who had escaped deserted them the next day in the boats. There they remained unvisited for some seventy years, with little to disturb the monotony beyond the adventures of the Doctor, who was secured in turn by Miss Smith and a shark. All this is contained in chapter one. The second chapter opens in 1922 at Cambridge, where lived the descendants of one of the sailors who deserted-a professor and his three children. A document and chart coming into the professor's hands, left by his dead grandfather, telling the story of the marooning of Miss Smith and the orphans, the professor and his family voyage out to the island and find there a thriving community, and Orphan Island is chiefly concerned with the community and the relations of it to the professor and his family.

Avg Rating

3.38

Number of Ratings

5 STARS

14%

4 STARS

31%

3 STARS

41%

2 STARS

1 STARS

goodreads

Author

Rose Macaulay

Author · 18 books

Emilie Rose Macaulay, whom Elizabeth Bowen called "one of the few writers of whom it may be said, she adorns our century," was born at Rugby, where her father was an assistant master. Descended on both sides from a long line of clerical ancestors, she felt Anglicanism was in her blood. Much of her childhood was spent in Varazze, near Genoa, and memories of Italy fill the early novels. The family returned to England in 1894 and settled in Oxford. She read history at Somerville, and on coming down lived with her family first in Wales, then near Cambridge, where her father had been appointed a lecturer in English. There she began a writing career which was to span fifty years with the publication of her first novel, Abbots Verney, in 1906. When her sixth novel, The Lee Shore (1912), won a literary prize, a gift from her uncle allowed her to rent a tiny flat in London, and she plunged happily into London literary life. From BookRags: http://www.bookrags.com/biography/ros...