A Literature of Their Own by Elaine Showalter
Published 1977 · 392 pages · 98,000 words · about 8 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is A Literature of Their Own to read?
A Literature of Their Own scores 60 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: 62 out of 100
- Critical vocabulary including 'gynocriticism', 'phallocentric', 'androgyny' alongside accessible feminist argument.
- Sentence structure: 58 out of 100
- Abstraction: 70 out of 100
- Constructs a three-phase historical-theoretical model for women's literary tradition.
- Information density: 76 out of 100
- Dense with textual evidence and historical recovery of marginalised writers.
- Narrative indirection: 15 out of 100
- Historical-critical argument; not indirected, but builds a case through accumulation.
- Symbolic density: 14 out of 100
- Some symbolic readings of Victorian body and domestic space.
- Ironic distance: 16 out of 100
- Controlled irony about male critical traditions that ignored women's writing.
- Resolution withholding: 12 out of 100
- The three-phase model provides clear resolution; open questions are acknowledged.
- Structural complexity: 36 out of 100
- Chronological-thematic structure across the three phases with author-centred chapters.
How A Literature of Their Own is regarded
A Literature of Their Own holds a literary regard score of 85 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.