ABSTRACT
This chapter interrogates both female and children's Robinsonades to chart how the female Crusoe was transformed into the girl Crusoe in late Victorian fiction for girls. The only non-native, active female Crusoe considered in this chapter, Hannah sinks into an extended sadness which culminates in her entering her chapel tomb to die, no longer able to endure the separation from humanity. Late Victorian girl Crusoes, who move beyond these categorizations of eighteenth-century and mid-nineteenth-century Robinsonades, first appeared in periodicals, where girls' adventure fiction was germinating. The chapter suggests the realities of colonial settlement infuses late nineteenth-century British girl Crusoes with a capacity for survival that is not intrinsic to the protagonists of earlier children's and female Robinsonades. The girl Crusoe embodies the reality of the involvement of young women in the British imperial project and is representative of the idealization of altered feminine norms when English women ventured beyond the safety and civilization of home to settle in new lands.
