All I want to know is, did women in the 1800s really faint so much? In the old books I've been reading (Dickens, etc), it seems to be a very common occurrence, while I've never seen anyone faint in my life :-P But whether that would be an on-topic question, is another matter, lol
This is what I've found so far (before going off on a rabbit trail): http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2015/05/women-fainted-much-19th-century/
A reddit thread with literally all the comments deleted... how enlightening... https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4rrcvw/did_ladies_really_faint_all_the_time_in_the_past/
Seems everybody else just references that first page... the phenomenon seems to be mostly attributed to the tight, heavy clothes in fashion at the time, the lead and arsenic in common items, and fainting being considered an elegant thing to do :-P
@Feeds Harry Mulisch isn't Danish literature, it's Dutch!
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@kristan I once read that they fainted so much because they were expected to faint easily ... Of course, narrow corsets, which made deep breathing difficult, didn't help.
@Bookworm It's not the traditional type of recommendation question (i.e. one that would result in an open-ended list) because it focuses on a single novel, but I don't see how to make it answerable in an objective (or at least "inter-subjective") way.
This month we're into Dutch literature with #HarryMulisch's "The Assault". Come join us! https://literature.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1050/announcing-the-july-2018-reading-challenge-the-assault
@b_jonas Hmm, I think you might be overselling Ms Rowling just a little there ;-)
@b_jonas Have you tried Dostoevsky's The Idiot? I had to give up reading it because I couldn't keep track of all the characters and who had what relationship to whom. One day I'll come back to it with a pencil and paper and draw a bunch of diagrams and family trees just to follow it all.
@b_jonas Meh, a lot of multi-volume series do that. In some cases it might even be that the author wanted to publish a single volume but the publisher wouldn't let them. See LotR, for instance.
@Mithrandir Excellent - Neil Gaiman would approve. (According to Pratchett at least, he loves it when people bring their old, dog-eared, falling-apart, dropped-in-the-bath, copies of Good Omens for him to sign.)
I know from reading the xanth novels that the daemon xanth put another daemon in charge of providing the humans with their specific talents (magic abilities that they can use at will). Now my question is this:how did that particular daemon get his/her job in the beginning?
I figured that it was ...
