Rachel Vorona Cote

I agree with the reviewer who said this book was not what they expected. I wanted to read it because I am writing a biography of an American woman who lived 1893 to 1960, and because my mother was strongly influenced by her foster parents who were born two decades before that. I agree with the thesis that Victorians do not accept a full range of emotions in a woman. However, as another reviewer said, this book spends a lot of time on literary analysis and then with personal memoir. The literary analysis is preponderately of British books (maybe all; I admit I did not read the whole book), and the personal memoir felt self-indulgent. I expected something about American Victorians, of which there were plenty, authors too, and something less a complaint about how nobody understood the author. While American Victorian fiction might not be as successful in a literary sense as the stars of the British Victorian literary firmament, they have more to say to American women, I feel, and should not be altogether neglected by a study such as this one.… (más)

“When we live authentically, Too Much women risk the litany of assessments recounted to me, a liturgy of intended shame, although we strive to embrace it: loud, shrieky, shouty, shrill, intimidating, difficult, noisy, obnoxious, scary, strident, bitchy, bossy, pushy, not normal, intense, inappropriately lacking in deference, gobby, mouthy, unladylike, too friendly, too talkative, too emotional, too outspoken, too direct, too rash, too passionate, too much.”

Too Much is a triumphant celebration of difficult and thorny women, demanding and impatient girl children, and temperamental females with heady, unbridled emotions and complicated eccentricities. Vorona Cote hugs the line of erudite and her text will certainly appeal more to readers with English Literature degrees or those whose interests gravitate towards that arena, as those without a background in or specific interest in this discipline may find the text tedious at times. However, her passion for women’s stories, women’s deviances, and women’s intensities make Too Much a love letter to the wild in all of us.

“In nearly every corner of our lives, we are reminded that the world was neither built for our welfare nor our benefit.”

Vorona Cote considers many of the major players of both Victorian and modern literature, touching on the Brontës, George Eliot, Lewis Carroll, Charles Dickens, Christina Rossetti, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Elizabeth Gaskell, while also addressing a few of the shining stars of classic and well-known literature who boldly bucked the norm, such as Pippi Longstocking, Ramona Quimby, and the beloved heroines of novels by Jane Austen. Too Much addresses mental illness, fatness and body image, perceptions of beauty, sexuality, ageism, self-harm, and the role of white privilege, among other topics, in all of these as she travels through literary and pop culture history.

Three quarters of the way through Too Much we take a fairly heavy-handed turn into memoir territory that is relatively distracting as her personal narrative takes the driver’s seat, but Vorona Cote mostly succeeds at drawing potent connections between her own experiences and the overarching focus of her text, working to link her personal life to those of Victorian literary characters. I found a few of her analyses to be somewhat hyperbolized, particularly her tendency to project onto close relationships between female characters and what may be construed by some readers as a glorification of mental illness. However, Vorona Cote’s stark vulnerability, vast understanding of Victorian literary history, and insistence that our too-muchness is a characteristic worth being owned made this read an overall success for me.… (más)

I received a copy of this book for free from the publisher (Grand Central Publishing) in exchange for an honest review.
I was really intrigued by the idea behind the book and I was really excited to read it. Ultimately, it didn’t quite live up to my expectations.

The book started off really strong with a lot of literary analysis. Then it sort of became a memoir with some literary analysis. I would have preferred if it stayed more on the literary side. There was a lot that could have been explored.

I did like the pop culture analysis. That worked well in illustrating the Victorian influence in today’s world.

There were some critiques that I didn’t necessarily agree with. Some things were overanalyzed (like the Alice in Wonderland critique).

The synopsis mentions that Lana Del Rey is discussed in the book. Lana Del Rey is one of my favorite singers so I was looking forward to reading about her. I was a little disappointed that she didn’t talk too much about her. She gets mentioned in the beginning of the Crazy chapter, but it ended up being mainly song lyrics. That got me thinking that there should have been a chapter on sadness (Sad girls is a pretty big phenomenon right now). Lana would have worked well for that.

Overall, there were some interesting points made. The book just didn’t hit me like I thought it would.… (más)