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, with little to disturb the monotony beyond the adventures of the Doctor, who was secured in turn by Miss Smith and a shark. All this is contained in chapter one. The second chapter opens in 1922 at Cambridge, where lived the descendants of one of the sailors who deserted-a professor and his three children. A document and chart coming into the professor's hands, left by his dead grandfather, telling the story of the marooning of Miss Smith and the orphans, the professor and his family voyage out to the island and find there a thriving community, and Orphan Island is chiefly concerned with the community and the relations of it to the professor and his family.

Author Biography

Emilie Rose Macaulay (1881-1958) was born in Rugby, Warwickshire but spent her early childhood in Italy. She was educated at Oxford High School for Girls and Somerville College, Oxford, where she read Modern History. She wrote her first novel, Abbots Verney, in 1906, while living in Great Shelford, near Cambridge. Rose became an ardent Anglo-Catholic and, through her great childhood friendship with Rupert Brooks, was introduced to London literary society. After moving to London, in 1914 published her first book of poetry, The Two Blind Countries. In 1918 she met the novelist and former Catholic priest Gerald O'Donovan, the married man with whom she was to have an affair lasting until his death. Her final and most famous novel, The Towers of Trebizond (1956), was awarded a James Tait Black Memorial Prize and became a bestseller in America. Rose Macaulay was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1958, but seven months later suffered a heart attack and died at her home.