Release Date:  February 24th, 2020

Genre(s): Non-fiction

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Pages: 532

Rating: .5

Note: I received an e-ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

Too Much: How Victorian Constraints Still Bind Women Today provides many examples of Victorian classics and culture and compares them to the ways that women are still confined today. Rachel Vorona Cote looks at both the authors and works that represented the norms of the Victorian era, as well as the authors that sought to break them. Each chapter features an emotion or characteristic that women are often shunned for demonstrating “too much” of, and features portions of the author’s own life, memoir-style, to further emphasize those constraints in her life.

When I originally saw this book, I saw it as a perfect fit for me. I enjoy Victorian literature, but I specifically enjoy the work of the Brontes, who I found were breaking the norm when it came to gender roles – and all things I feel we still have to deal with to this day! But of course, the characters they wrote could only go so far, as the Victorian era had many limits for them. So the link between authors like the Brontes and feminism has been on my mind for a while, and when I saw this book, I had to read it immediately. Sadly, it did not live up to my expectations.

Between the full title of Too Much and its synopsis, I expected two things – examples of constraints on Victorian women, and examples of those same constraints on women today. And while the book technically does this, it’s organized in such a way that the whole concept of the book is lost. Additionally, the content and tone of this book change so frequently. Sometimes it’s a memoir, sometimes it’s critiquing literature with sophisticated dialogue, and sometimes it’s extremely casual. All of these things on their own are fine, but put together it makes for a very confusing execution.

I also wasn’t expecting this book to be so memoir-heavy – in fact, I wasn’t expecting a memoir element to this at all. And I don’t want to say that her experiences weren’t valuable to the overarching themes of this book, because they were. What I did find, though, is that with everything else happening in this book, having a memoir element on top of it all added to the confusion of the whole concept. For each chapter’s subject matter, the book was covering Victorian (or other) literature and traditions, covering modern cultural examples, and discussing the author’s life. And considering the whole point of this book, I really hate to say that it was “too much” because the subject matter here is important and should be discussed. However, there was so much information here that it took away from what the book was supposed to be about.

Additionally, there were quite a few portions of this book that stood out to me in a way that removed me from the book. For one, many of the “modern” cultural examples discussed here are not so modern compared to the book’s publication date. A lot of the references are about 10-15 years old. Which isn’t “old” per se, but old enough where I’d need a recap. But the book doesn’t really do that. For instance, one of the cultural references it uses as an example is the movie Bridesmaids. But the author discusses this movie assuming that every reader must have seen this movie. Luckily, all of the information I could ever need or want is at my fingertips, but I’ve also never read a non-fiction book like this where they didn’t explain the premise or assume that I must know what they’re talking about. I could understand a lack of description with more recent examples, but not so much with slightly older ones for things many readers might not be aware of. Or maybe I’m the only person who doesn’t watch rom-coms. Who knows? That honestly could just be me.

Another part of this book that threw me for a loop was her critique of Alice in Wonderland, which is mentioned twice. In the scene where Alice’s body continually grows, shrinks, and becomes unbalanced, the author cites this as a commentary on the female body and others’ expectations of it. Additionally, when Alice causes a flood from crying too much, the author cites this as women being too emotional.

Alice is a book that was heavily referenced while taking courses for my Computer Science degree, and my professors have studied this book heavily. In fact, many of the discrete mathematics problems we solved in our coursework were Carroll’s own. So for this scene in particular, as well as Alice crying “too much” and the other proportional issues throughout the novel, were actually introduced to me as Carroll’s critique of symbolic algebra and some of the absurdities that come into play while working on these problems. The author’s interpretations certainly can and do co-exist with the mathematical satire in the book, but the way this was written to me read like this was the only meaning behind these scenes, and that made me lose my focus. And this, again, is something I’d see in other non-fiction books where you would get the full background, and all of the angles before honing in on one interpretation. Like I said, I completely understand what the author is saying here and I agree with it, but the fact that a major element of the book is missing from that discussion made me feel less confident about what I was reading. Or maybe I’m just really passionate about math and don’t like rom-coms.

In any case, Too Much was not a flat one star for me because the author is really passionate about Victorian literature and feminism, and her intent and emotion shows it. Additionally, there were plenty of literary works I was introduced to here that I want to check out after reading this. Overall, I just found that this book would have carried so much more power if it was more organized and the overall concept of this book condensed. With all of the books, cultural examples, and stories of the author’s life, this could have been a whole series of books, because the author has so much that she can share on this subject. But it was a lot for one book, and I think it would have read much better if this were organized better, and with fewer, more developed examples in place of many underdeveloped ones. I do wish I had liked this one more, but I’m happy to see that this is a subject matter that people are talking about (and that authors are writing books about).