Orphan Island

“...extremely well told, with real sparkle in the style” —The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science, and Art “...is one of the richest performances of the year. A steady, even draft of noiseless humor, playing upon one thousand associations and insinuating a whole philosophy of history in its cunning ingenuities.” —London Observer “...is a masterpiece of satire. Fosters our sense of fun and creates a grateful glow in the heart.” —London Daily Telegraph “...is an opportunity for the exercise of her satiric, not to say wicked wit, which she turns to full and simply delicious account.” —London Truth “...a most fascinating and… effective piece of gentle irony.” —The New York Times 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... 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. “...is much more human, more humane, and richer in a certain vein of poetic imagination than even Told by an Idiot.” —London Guardian “A more delectable piece of fooling than Orphan Island would be hard to find.” —Atlantic’s Bookshelf “A most entertaining novel which may justly exceed its predecessors in popularity.” —Boston Transcript “There is a good deal of clever writing in the book, and genuine vitality in the portrait of that remarkable female, Miss Smith.” —Int. Book Review