Frankenstein: The 1818 Text by Mary Shelley
Published 2021
How hard is Frankenstein: The 1818 Text to read?
Frankenstein: The 1818 Text scores 61 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 68 out of 100
- Ornate Romantic diction, considerably heavier than the story's reputation suggests.
- Sentence structure: 72 out of 100
- Long, elevated, heavily subordinated sentences.
- Abstraction: 60 out of 100
- Concrete action framed by sustained argument about creation and responsibility.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- Unhurried; the plot is spare relative to the page count.
- Narrative indirection: 65 out of 100
- Three nested narrators — Walton, Victor, the creature — each with their own interest in the telling.
- Symbolic density: 72 out of 100
- Fire, ice, light and the Prometheus frame run through every part.
- Ironic distance: 45 out of 100
- Victor's self-justification is visibly unreliable, though the novel does not mock him.
- Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
- The creature vanishes into the ice; the moral question is left open.
- Structural complexity: 62 out of 100
- A frame within a frame within a frame, in epistolary form.
How Frankenstein: The 1818 Text is regarded
Frankenstein: The 1818 Text holds a literary regard score of 95 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.