The French Novel from Stendhal to Proust by Martin Turnell
Published 1950 · 120,000 words · about 10 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is The French Novel from Stendhal to Proust to read?
The French Novel from Stendhal to Proust scores 55 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: 60 out of 100
- Clear, forceful critical prose in the Scrutiny tradition.
- Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
- Abstraction: 70 out of 100
- Moral and aesthetic generalization grounded in close textual reading.
- Information density: 74 out of 100
- Each chapter covers a major novelist comprehensively with sustained argument.
- Narrative indirection: 12 out of 100
- Leavisite critical directness throughout — argument is stated, evidence cited, judgment delivered.
- Symbolic density: 14 out of 100
- Focus is on meaning and morality rather than symbolic structure.
- Ironic distance: 12 out of 100
- Earnest moral seriousness characterizes the critical stance.
- Resolution withholding: 100 out of 100
- Every chapter arrives at a clear evaluative judgment.
- Structural complexity: 32 out of 100
- Author-by-author organization with a clear historical logic.
How The French Novel from Stendhal to Proust is regarded
The French Novel from Stendhal to Proust holds a literary regard score of 71 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.