Margery Kempe by Robert Glück
Published 1994 · 44,550 words · about 5 hours at an average pace
How hard is Margery Kempe to read?
Margery Kempe scores 68 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
- Medieval devotional language spliced with contemporary sex writing.
- Sentence structure: 65 out of 100
- Long sentences that switch register mid-clause.
- Abstraction: 72 out of 100
- Desire and devotion treated as the same abstraction.
- Information density: 62 out of 100
- Dense with the medieval source.
- Narrative indirection: 72 out of 100
- The author and the medieval mystic share a narrator who is neither.
- Symbolic density: 68 out of 100
- The whole book runs on typology.
- Ironic distance: 58 out of 100
- Devotion and pornography held together deliberately.
- Resolution withholding: 72 out of 100
- There is no resolution and none is sought.
- Structural complexity: 78 out of 100
- Two centuries interleaved with no markers.
How Margery Kempe is regarded
Margery Kempe holds a literary regard score of 47 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.