The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
Published 1893 · 28,050 words · about 2 hours at an average pace
How hard is The Importance of Being Earnest to read?
The Importance of Being Earnest scores 50 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. 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: 58 out of 100
- Elegant late-Victorian vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
- Immaculately balanced comic sentences.
- Abstraction: 48 out of 100
- Concrete social comedy carrying a critique of earnestness itself.
- Information density: 52 out of 100
- Epigram-dense; almost every line is worked.
- Narrative indirection: 35 out of 100
- A play, so nothing is narrated; the audience sees the deceptions directly.
- Symbolic density: 45 out of 100
- The handbag and the double life carry the theme.
- Ironic distance: 92 out of 100
- Nearly every line means the opposite of what it says; the irony is the whole method.
- Resolution withholding: 30 out of 100
- An absurdly complete resolution, which is itself the joke.
- Structural complexity: 40 out of 100
- Three acts, tightly constructed.
How The Importance of Being Earnest is regarded
The Importance of Being Earnest holds a literary regard score of 90 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.