Discretion was a crucial attribute, its lack a gaping, irreconcilable absence likely to result in one’s exclusion from future palace dinner parties. Or perhaps it merely indicates that commoners were denied the privilege of feeling at ease in her royal presence as such, telling the wrong cheeky joke was a sign of grave presumption. This mortal social wound-being branded as indiscreet by Her Majesty-implies the value she placed upon its opposing quality, discretion. The transgressor shuddered into silence, while the awful “We are not amused” annihilated the dinner table…The Queen would observe that the person in question was, she very much feared, “not discreet”: it was a verdict from which there was no appeal. The royal lips sank down at the corners, the royal eyes stared in astonished protrusion, and in fact the royal countenance became inauspicious in the highest degree. She and her husband live in Takoma Park, MD, just outside of Washington, D.C.Near the end of his best-selling biography of Queen Victoria, Lytton Strachey delivers a sketch of her notoriously chilling response to social blunders, should one be committed in her midst: Rachel holds a BA from the College of William and Mary and was ABD in a doctoral program in English at the University of Maryland, studying and teaching the literature of the Victorian period. She was also previously a contributing writer at Jezebel.

Rachel Vorona Cote publishes frequently in such outlets as the New Republic, Longreads, Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, Literary Hub, Catapult, the Poetry Foundation, Hazlitt, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, where her essay on Taylor Swift and Victorian female friendship was one of the site's most popular essays in 2015. She has taught fiction at Columbia University and has been awarded fellowships from the Folger Shakespeare Library and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Hilary Leichter's writing has appeared in n+1, the New Yorker, the Cut, the Southern Review, and elsewhere. This event will be held on Women & Children First's Crowdcast Channel.Īttendees can register through Eventbrite HERE or directly through Crowdcast. Join us for a virtual conversation with Hilary Leichter ( Temporary) and Rachel Vorona Cote ( Too Much: How Victorian Constraints Still Bind Women Today) to celebrate their recent books and discuss fairy tales, femininity, and how these foundational texts have shaped their own lives and books as well as the larger culture.

Rachel vorona cote