The immediate and immense success of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe in 1719 gave rise to a flow of new publications, inspired by Robinson Crusoe’s adventures, or by the success of Defoe’s book. In the following centuries hundreds of robinsonades were published. Most of them were written by male authors and told the stories of male shipwrecked or other male adventures. As a genre, the robinsonade is thus usually understood – although implicitly – in highly gendered masculine terms: this is the story of a male hero’s fight for survival in a nature which at first sight seems hostile, but which can be mastered. And it is closely related to narratives of travel, discovery and sea adventures in which male authors and male heroes predominated. However, the robinsonade is not that unigendered as canonical literary history seems to imply: From early eighteenth century up to the present, women have read, written and been protagonists in castaway stories.These stories are not as numerous as the male robinsonades, but they are many enough to make also “female robinsonades" an important current within European literary culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
This website includes a bibliography of female robinsonades from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The bibliography is elaborated by Anne Birgitte Rønning, Professor in Comparative Literature at the University of Oslo, to present book historical research on the genre and to facilitate further research. Questions, comments and suggestions are welcome. Please contact me: a.b.ronning@ilos.uio.no.