The abandonment on an island, the survival against all odds, the rescue and return — these events were dramatic enough to generate the literary interest that preserved them.

But the survival instinct she demonstrated — the capacity to maintain functioning, to find resources, to keep going through the accumulation of loss and hardship — is not extraordinary in the sense of being rare in women.

What is extraordinary is that her experience was documented at all.

The historical record is full of women who survived things they were not supposed to survive, who endured conditions they were not expected to endure, who kept going when everything in their circumstances argued against it.

Most of their stories were not recorded.