Lodore by Mary Shelley
Published 1835 · 150,000 words · about 10 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is Lodore to read?
Lodore scores 34 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: 55 out of 100
- Early Victorian prose with social, legal, and financial vocabulary. Accessible Romantic English with occasional classical allusion.
- Sentence structure: 50 out of 100
- Well-constructed Romantic prose with some long sentences. Less rhetorically intense than Frankenstein or Mathilda.
- Abstraction: 40 out of 100
- Women's economic and social dependence is explored through concrete situations rather than abstract argument.
- Information density: 40 out of 100
- Multiple family plots across two generations with financial and social complications. Moderate density for a three-volume novel.
- Narrative indirection: 30 out of 100
- Third-person omniscient narration with clear moral perspective. The autobiographical subtext adds indirection for informed readers.
- Symbolic density: 30 out of 100
- The American frontier, the London debtors' world, and the contrasting women carry some symbolic weight but the novel is primarily realist.
- Ironic distance: 30 out of 100
- The narrator's sympathy for the women is direct. Lodore and the elder Villiers are treated with more critical distance.
- Resolution withholding: 20 out of 100
- The marriages are reconciled, debts resolved, and Cornelia redeemed. The resolution is conventional but earned.
- Structural complexity: 35 out of 100
- Three-volume structure with multiple family plots spanning two generations and two continents. Conventional Victorian architecture.
How Lodore is regarded
Lodore holds a literary regard score of 45 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.