The Beggar Maid by Alice Munro
Published 1980 · 227 pages · 82,239 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Short Fiction
How hard is The Beggar Maid to read?
The Beggar Maid scores 54 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: 50 out of 100
- Canadian vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 52 out of 100
- Munro's precise prose.
- Abstraction: 55 out of 100
- Class, love, identity.
- Information density: 52 out of 100
- Ontario life.
- Narrative indirection: 55 out of 100
- Third person, time jumps.
- Symbolic density: 55 out of 100
- Beggar maid painting.
- Ironic distance: 55 out of 100
- Class awareness.
- Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
- Life continues.
- Structural complexity: 55 out of 100
- Linked stories.
How The Beggar Maid is regarded
The Beggar Maid holds a literary regard score of 80 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.