Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson
Published 1992 · 52,250 words · about 3 hours at an average pace
How hard is Written on the Body to read?
Written on the Body scores 65 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: 58 out of 100
- Lyrical, with a long section of borrowed anatomical vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 60 out of 100
- Long lyrical sentences.
- Abstraction: 68 out of 100
- The body treated as language rather than flesh.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- Light on incident, heavy on figure.
- Narrative indirection: 78 out of 100
- A narrator whose gender and name are deliberately never given.
- Symbolic density: 72 out of 100
- The anatomy sections turn the beloved entirely into figure.
- Ironic distance: 55 out of 100
- Some distance between the narrator's romanticism and their conduct.
- Resolution withholding: 68 out of 100
- The ending is deliberately unfixed.
- Structural complexity: 62 out of 100
- Fragmented, with an inserted anatomy in the middle.
How Written on the Body is regarded
Written on the Body holds a literary regard score of 68 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.