To the editors:
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Reading in Cecil Adams’s column “Straight Dope,” Chicago Reader [May 6, 1988], the letter about the novels of yesteryears in which the ladies swooned easily, I wondered as to what period were the novels the writer of the letter had in mind. To begin with, the novel was not invented until the Eighteen Century, and the writers who wrote in the new genre such as Swift, Addison, Fielding, Goldsmith, Samuel Johnson, Defoe, to name only a few, didn’t write romances, that is, in which extreme emotion is expressed–emotion that could cause a lady’s swooning.
Yet, today, many are the women who suffered even strokes after hearing that a son or beloved husband was killed in the war or in an accident, or died of sickness. And as many were unable to survive the loss, had even ended their lives or suffered chronic depression.
