The Tearoom Library, No. 037 — Isola
Author: Allegra Goodman
Genre: Historical Fiction · Adventure · Romance
Rating: ★★★★★
Follow-Up Reading:
Circe — Madeline Miller
(for exile, solitude, and a woman remaking herself outside the world that rejects her)The Company Daughters — Samantha Rajaram
(for colonial displacement, female agency, and the pressures of belonging)Hamnet — Maggie O’Farrell
(for grief, interior life, and the quiet endurance of women within history)
The Book of the City of Ladies
In order to fully understand the power of Isola, one must return to a medieval work that has, in recent years, found renewed resonance as the world has begun to reconsider women’s voices in literature and history.
Written by Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies is a visionary allegorical work that reimagines history as a place where women’s voices, achievements, and moral strength are not dismissed or forgotten, but deliberately built into the foundations of a symbolic city. In this imagined space, de Pizan constructs a refuge where exemplary women from myth, scripture, and history are gathered and honored as part of a lasting intellectual and moral architecture.
At the heart of the work are three allegorical figures—Reason, Rectitude, and Justice—who guide de Pizan in her task of constructing this city and in challenging the inherited assumptions about women’s supposed inferiority. The result is both a defense and an act of creation: a text that argues for women’s worth while simultaneously building a world in which that worth is made visible and permanent.
De Pizan’s work was radical for its time and widely read among learned and powerful women, who found in it both validation and encouragement. Its emphasis on moral and intellectual agency offered an alternative framework for understanding women’s lives, one that continues to feel unexpectedly modern in its clarity and conviction. While I have not yet read it myself, I am fascinated by it, and plan to this year.
In Isola, the protagonist Marguerite has read The Book of the City of Ladies. It is one of her most cherished books from childhood, and its vision of resilience, moral strength, and inner architecture becomes quietly essential to her survival during the merciless trials that begin when she turns fifteen.
Cousin, Guardian, Tyrant
Marguerite, the protagonist of Isola, is an orphan whose story begins in France in 1531. Her mother dies in childbirth, and her father is killed in battle when she is only three years old. Of him, Marguerite reflects: “When I was three years old, he was killed fighting for the King at Pavia. Then I was rich, although I did not know it, and poor, although I did not know it.” She inherits a chateau in Périgord, complete with villagers, vineyards, and farmland, yet she is left without the family who might have given that inheritance meaning.
In the absence of close relatives, Marguerite is placed under the guardianship of a cousin she has never met—Jean-François de La Rocque de Roberval. Known primarily for his connection to the French court, Roberval is a man of ambition and instability, who believes himself entitled to the comforts of Marguerite’s estate. Once appointed her guardian, he sells her property and prepares to embark on an expedition to New France, determined to secure fortune and status in the expanding colonial world.
Marguerite, now fifteen, is not left behind. Roberval insists she accompany him, along with her devoted nurse, Damienne, who refuses to abandon her charge despite her age. What should have been a transition into protected adulthood instead becomes a forced journey into uncertainty, displacement, and isolation.
As Marguerite enters this precarious world, Roberval’s authority begins to reveal a darker edge. What had been framed as guardianship gradually takes on the contours of possession. In this enclosed hierarchy of power, Marguerite’s limited choices become increasingly perilous, particularly as she forms a quiet attachment to Auguste, one of Roberval’s young assistants.
What follows is not only a story of survival, but of moral pressure and psychological endurance—where authority becomes coercion, and where a young woman must learn, quickly and painfully, how to preserve herself within a world determined to define her as property.
Songs, Ships, & Romance
I am deeply fascinated by tales of brave souls who sail into the great unknown, in both fiction and nonfiction.
Nathaniel Philbrick’s In the Heart of the Sea recounts the ordeal of a whaling crew shipwrecked and left to endure months of near-unimaginable hardship before rescue. I have also written about Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance, one of the most famous accounts of survival in an uninhabited, hostile landscape.
Isola belongs to this tradition of survival narratives, but it turns that tradition inward in a darker and more unsettling way. Marguerite is not merely forced into an expedition—she is compelled into it under guardianship, in a state of constant psychological pressure. Roberval’s authority is unpredictable and punitive; he takes pleasure in unsettling her, in keeping her perpetually off balance, and in making even the smallest mistake feel consequential.
When Marguerite and Auguste quietly fall in love, finding in one another a refuge from Roberval’s cruelty, their bond becomes something far more dangerous in his eyes than mere romance. It becomes an affront to his control—a chance, as he sees it, to exercise absolute power over lives he considers his own to direct.
After a prolonged period of feigned ignorance, Roberval abruptly reveals his intent. Marguerite, Auguste, and Damienne are to be abandoned on a remote and desolate island, left with provisions and tools but no real means of escape. It is a place of extreme isolation, where winters are severe and survival is uncertain. What is framed as an act of provisioning is, in truth, a calculated act of exile.
Damienne, even in her old age, adapts with quiet practicality. She turns instinctively to the work of maintaining order—keeping house as best she can in a world that offers no real shelter. Her endurance is not dramatic, but steady, almost invisible.
What follows is Marguerite’s long transformation. She is no longer the privileged child who once expected to inherit a chateau, nor the frightened girl at the mercy of others’ decisions. Over time, through loss, labor, and endurance, she becomes something harder to define.
Isola is a novel of survival, love, and female rage. It is not an easy read; its darker passages lingered with me long after I set it down.
At its core, it is a story of metamorphosis—not into something delicate or decorative, but into something enduring and formidable: a creature adapted to survive what it was never meant to endure.
A Note from the Margin
What remains with me after reading Isola is not only its story, but its insistence on transformation under pressure—on what a person becomes when every structure meant to protect her is removed. It is a novel that asks the reader to sit with endurance in its most unsettling forms, and to consider how survival reshapes identity itself.
I needed the solace of my journal in which to sift through the chaotic emotions that Marguerite’s ordeal brought into my heart. For those who read on in the Tearoom Circle, I am sharing what I wrote there—thoughts still unarranged, but honest in their unrest.
