But she endured it.

And the accounts, for all their literary shaping, preserve a core that is consistent with what we know about the psychology of long-term survival: that faith, routine, and purposeful action can sustain a person through conditions that would otherwise destroy them.

The Legacy Of A Reluctant Heroine

Marguerite de la Rocque did not set out to become a historical figure.

She was a young French noblewoman who got on a ship with her relative and found herself, through a combination of her own choices and the choices of others, on an uninhabited island in the North Atlantic.