A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen
Published 1879 · 28,426 words · about 2 hours at an average pace · Drama
How hard is A Doll's House to read?
A Doll's House scores 51 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: 45 out of 100
- Realistic dialogue in contemporary setting; accessible language.
- Sentence structure: 40 out of 100
- Prose dialogue designed to sound natural; sentences are simple.
- Abstraction: 55 out of 100
- Social critique emerges through specific situation; themes are shown, not argued.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- Well-made play structure plants information efficiently.
- Narrative indirection: 50 out of 100
- Secrets are revealed progressively; the ending's meaning is debated.
- Symbolic density: 55 out of 100
- The tarantella, the Christmas tree, the doll imagery—symbolic layer beneath realism.
- Ironic distance: 55 out of 100
- The audience sees Torvald's failures before Nora does; gentle dramatic irony.
- Resolution withholding: 65 out of 100
- Nora leaves; what happens next is not shown; the slamming door ends, not resolves.
- Structural complexity: 40 out of 100
- Three acts, single set, classical unities; well-made play structure.
How A Doll's House is regarded
A Doll's House holds a literary regard score of 89 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.