The primary early source for her account is Marguerite de Navarre — the queen of Navarre, sister of King François I, and one of the most remarkable women of the French Renaissance.

Marguerite de Navarre was a writer, theologian, and court intellectual of genuine distinction.

She is best known today for the Heptaméron, a collection of tales modeled on Boccaccio’s Decameron, in which a group of aristocrats tell stories during a period of confinement imposed by flood.

The Heptaméron was composed in the 1540s and was published posthumously in 1558.

Within the Heptaméron, in its sixty-seventh tale, Marguerite de Navarre included the story of a woman who was abandoned on an island by a ship captain, who survived the deaths of those around her, and who eventually returned to France.

The queen of Navarre does not name her source directly, but historians have consistently identified the tale as based on the story of Marguerite de la Rocque — the geography, the circumstances, and the period all align, and the queen of Navarre had both the social connections and the interest in women’s experiences that would have led her to record such a story.