In 2012, doctoral student Hosanna Krienke was looking for topics for her dissertation on British literature. A recovering cancer patient, she was struck by the recurring theme of sickness and recuperation in 19th-century novels. Although Krienke had recently finished immunotherapy treatment, she still felt like a patient. Everyone around her behaved like it was all over, “and I couldn’t express why I didn’t feel the same."
Why was it, Krienke wondered, that characters in famous Victorian novels—from Charles Dickens’s Bleak House to Francis Burnett’s The Secret Garden—felt free to spend so much time getting better? And why is it that nowadays people are expected to recuperate quickly after serious illness or injury?
The answer lay in changing attitudes to recovery, she found.
