Point of View

The Illness Lesson is narrated in past tense from the third person limited point-of-view of Caroline Hood, a 29-year-old woman living on a Massachusetts farm with her father, Samuel. The third person narrator provides Caroline's thoughts and feelings, and most importantly, her anxieties, which evolve and intensify over the course of the novel.

Caroline is in a peculiar situation for her historical moment, 1871, as she has been provided with a rigorous education by her father that was quite unusual for women at the time. However, as much as this education shapes her thoughts, it has little effect on the circumstances of her life, as she feels confined to the domestic sphere just as most other women are. Since her mother died when she was just four years old, she has been her father's constant companion and she feels she could never leave him because he...