Heroes

The Robinson heroines are most often young girls, as in Comtesse de Germanie's La petite fille de Robinson (1844) or Ann Fraser Tytler's Leila, or the Island (1839), or adolescents and young women, as in Madame Daubenton's Zelie dans le désert (1786) or Mellin's Öjungfrun (1832), but in Frank R. Stockton's The casting away of Mrs Lecks and Mrs Aleshine (1886) the female shipwreckeds are middle aged widows. The robinsonade sequence only covers a part of the book, and the desert island they arrive at, offers a house in which they the use all their abilities in housekeeping.