Anna’s

This chapter examines Anna’s, a novel that reimagines Long John Silver in a female body. It argues that the novel goes beyond simply evoking the character of Long John Silver and instead it deliberately and comprehensively reconstructs Treasure Island—borrowing from its parent text both a complex and playful moral ambiguity and an initial setting in a coastal inn that was once a den for smugglers and pirates. Thus, Boyle’s tale takes the reader into the machinations of the quasi-piratical characters who spend their time at Anna’s public house, and like Treasure Island before it, Anna’s is keen to extend the amorality that we might find amongst the pirates and smugglers into the more genteel surroundings of the wider, more outwardly legitimate, coastal community. However, unlike Tresure Island, Boyle’s novel also forms a critique of the double standards at work in the playground of opportunity that the sea offers. This chapter examines Boyle’s nuanced treatment of the pirate trope and explores the ways in which she returns this trope to some of the real-life female pirates, such as Zheng Yi Sao, who made their living defeating fleets of professional male sailors.