"Bracing words indeed, yet considered in isolation they actually tell us very little about how Queen Victoria figured in 19th-century conversations about women's rights in Britain. Victoria's opinions about female emancipation, after all, were initially registered in private, not public. While her opposition to women's rights would have been well known to her correspondents and a small circle of friends and associates, it was not conveyed to a broader public until decades later. The Queen's letter of 1852 to her Uncle Leopold, for example, only came to public attention in 1876, when it was included in Theodore Martin's The Life of His Royal Highness the Prince Consort"--

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