The Nun by Denis Diderot
Published 1796 · 68,134 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Fiction, Philosophical Fiction, Gothic Fiction
How hard is The Nun to read?
The Nun scores 52 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: 42 out of 100
- The translation uses 18th-century English with period ecclesiastical vocabulary (novitiate, exhortation, habitudes, abbess) and period-appropriate formality. Readers encounter French convent terminology and polite Enlightenment diction, but the language remains accessible — nothing as dense as Melville's whaling jargon or Melville's Latinate registers.
- Sentence structure: 48 out of 100
- Diderot writes in balanced Enlightenment periods — long paragraphs built from compound sentences with moderate subordination. Dialogue sections are crisp and rapid-fire. Closer to The Great Gatsby in rhythm than Proustian hypotaxis, with occasional extended descriptive passages (the sewing-room tableau) that are scenic rather than syntactically demanding.
- Abstraction: 52 out of 100
- The novel grounds its anti-clerical argument in vivid concrete events — the stripped veil, the underground cell, the Superior's midnight visits — while threading philosophical assertions about vocation, freedom, and institutional corruption. Suzanne articulates her argument explicitly in confrontations with Superiors, giving abstract ideas dramatic flesh rather than treating them as pure discourse.
- Information density: 40 out of 100
- A single first-person memoir moving through three convents in linear sequence. The narrative concentrates on Suzanne's psychological predicament rather than branching subplots or historical apparatus. Denser than a contemporary thriller but lighter than epistolary novels like Clarissa — the frame narrative (the hoax on Croismare) adds one layer of interpretive context.
- Narrative indirection: 55 out of 100
- Suzanne is an unreliable innocent: she reports in clinical detail the Mother Superior's sexual arousal while insisting she had no idea what was happening until overhearing a confession. Readers must read against the narrator continuously in the third-convent episodes. Diderot's deliberate tense-muddle — switching between past and present, 'correcting' reported deaths — adds a further layer of indirection.
- Symbolic density: 48 out of 100
- The convent functions as a symbol of institutional suffocation, the black veil as the sacrifice of individual identity, and light imagery (candlelight, altar-lamps, Diderot's noted chiaroscuro) marks moral boundaries. Symbolism supports the argument but never displaces realist narration — the novel's power comes from specific scenes rather than sustained allegorical structure.
- Ironic distance: 62 out of 100
- The novel operates on a sustained ironic gap: Suzanne describes lesbian seduction with precise physical detail while maintaining complete claimed ignorance, and the Preface-Annexe reveals the entire narrative was itself a literary hoax. The Mother Superior of Sainte-Eutrope is simultaneously a figure of sympathy and exposure — Diderot's critique of the institution never hardens into simple condemnation.
- Resolution withholding: 62 out of 100
- Diderot deliberately cuts the narrative short with 'rough notes' rather than resolution: Suzanne escapes into a world she is unsuited for, sexually assaulted by her confessor, and left drifting with no skills, no future, and the temptation to return to the convent. The ending refuses closure — the French film adaptors notoriously felt they had to invent a death that Diderot pointedly withheld.
- Structural complexity: 45 out of 100
- The novel uses a framing device (the Preface-Annexe explaining the Croismare hoax) that sits outside the main epistolary memoir. Within the memoir, Diderot employs deliberate tense instability — a character reported dead then referred to in the present — which the translator preserved as intentional. This is more formally interesting than linear realism but considerably simpler than Nabokovian or Beckettian structural experiments.
How The Nun is regarded
The Nun holds a literary regard score of 75 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.