Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
Published 1811 · 372 pages · 116,851 words · about 8 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Romance, Satire & Humor
How hard is Sense and Sensibility to read?
Sense and Sensibility scores 53 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
- Regency-era vocabulary but Austen characteristic clarity. Period social terminology accessible to modern readers.
- Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
- Balanced sentences with ironic qualifications. Less syntactically complex than Emma or Mansfield Park.
- Abstraction: 52 out of 100
- Moral and psychological themes grounded in domestic drama. Philosophy emerges through character and situation.
- Information density: 52 out of 100
- Leisurely pacing by modern standards. Social detail accumulates gradually.
- Narrative indirection: 60 out of 100
- Third-person narration close to Elinor but with ironic distance. Reader sees more than characters do.
- Symbolic density: 42 out of 100
- Realistic novel with minimal overt symbolism. Title announces thematic opposition directly.
- Ironic distance: 75 out of 100
- Austen signature irony present throughout, though gentler than in later novels.
- Resolution withholding: 38 out of 100
- Marriage plot resolves definitively. Happy endings for both sisters.
- Structural complexity: 48 out of 100
- Parallel plots following two sisters. Conventional three-volume structure.
How Sense and Sensibility is regarded
Sense and Sensibility holds a literary regard score of 88 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.