I'm not sure if it would recover after a couple of minutes (I always just bite the bullet, force-quit, and retype out the last few minutes of work), but I can go back and experiment some more (after I get past my current deadline; I've switched to Word for the moment, to avoid losing more time and/or work in the short term). I also very occasionally open larger files in TextEdit, but not usually, and not lately, so I think size is not a factor in my case.