My last nomination is
Crusoe's Daughter by Jane Gardam. It's about a girl who in 1904 goes to live with her aunts, and she is orphaned. The aunts live in remote northern England by the sea, so isolated that it seems to the girl like she's marooned on an island. One of her favourite books growing up is Robinson Crusoe. She ends up staying there for over 80 years, as the world around her changes in incredible ways. I loved the preview I read, and this fits the topic as first of all there's the titular allusion to the famous Robinson, which an x would've marked the spot of the island he was shipwrecked on. As well, the protagonist of this book stays in the same place and so this isolated place could be viewed as the stable x while the world around changed so much.
Goodreads,
Preview, 265 pages, 1985, England
Quote:
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In 1904, when she was six, Polly Flint went to live with her two holy aunts at the yellow house by the marsh -- so close to the sea that it seemed to toss like a ship, so isolated that she might have been marooned on an island. And there she stayed for eighty-one years while the century raged around her, while lamplight and Victorian order became chaos and nuclear dread. Crusoe's Daughter, ambitious, moving and wholly original, is her story.
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