Invoking memories of Welsh dream narratives and romantic heroines of Welsh verse, the title of Lizzie Mary Jones's 1928 children's desert island novel Breuddwydion Myfanwy (The Dreams of Myfanwy), about a Welsh family's fateful voyage to Australia, does little to suggest any association with Robinson Crusoe's tale of adventure and survival. Yet this chapter will argue that the title heralds an aspiration to recast Defoe's well-known classic along new lines of gender and national identity. At first glance, this ambition is obscured by the plain brown hardboard covers and the absence of the customary vocabulary of castaway adventure narratives. The reader is offered no immediate, recognisable Robinsonesque visual or lexical contextualisation. No maps or illustrations adorn the front cover, and no reference is made to the ships, storms, or exotic islands that form an integral part of the narrative. Indeed, with only the title and author's name imprinted in gold on the cloth-covered spine, these four words alone must entice young readers to open its pages: Breuddwydion Myfanwy gan Moelona (the latter being the pen name of Elizabeth ‘Lizzie’ Mary Jones).

It is unlikely that readers encountering the book for the first time in 1928 had any notion that this newly published novel was based on the famous Robinson Crusoe narrative. Instead, they would have been drawn to the book out of necessity, it being one of only 25 (mainly educational) Welsh volumes published for children of all ages that year (Huws, 1997, 25–26). Furthermore, readers’ expectations would have been framed by the recognisability of both the author (the name ‘Moelona’ was taken from the name of Lizzie Jones's family home in west Wales) and the stark design of the Welsh ‘leisure hours series’ first published by the London company Foyle's a year earlier. Moelona's reputation as a teacher, author, and the editor of a children's column in the weekly newspaper Y Darian, together with Foyle's association with educational publishing, meant there would have been a shared understanding that this unassuming text would be received primarily as a didactic book for young readers of around ten to 12 years of age (Gramich, 2007, 57).