It's nice to see depictions of strong, happy, unmarried women like Hilda Annersley and Eustacia Benson, but I do think EBD had a 'delicacy' fetish.
To be really interesting in her world, you have to be delicate and highly-strung, like the redoubtable Joey.
Though on the one hand, Joey is depicted as being as strong as a horse - she has eleven kids, many of them multiple births, and is still climbing trees and scaling cliffs and beating athletic late teenage rugby players at swimming races in her forties - on the other hand she's clearly a Fragile, Delicate, Emotional Creature.
She has to be sedated as an adult all the time, including when she falls into a box, has a habit of fainting when perturbed (after the Passion Play, when she sees Alixe von Elsen sleepwalking, when her naughty son climbs down a cliff face after a bird's nest), and her children and husband are in a sort of conspiracy that, whatever happens, Joey must never be upset, ever. She's also sent to bed to rest for weeks, and has several of her children shipped off to relatives, because one of her daughters was in contact with scarlet fever (but didn't get it), and because a new CS girl she hardly knew was in an accident. She just cares so much more than other sturdy, unemotional, hardy people, who only have small numbers of children, one at a time ...