Wise Children by Angela Carter
Published 1991 · 20,899 words · about 2 hours at an average pace · Fiction, Literary Fiction, Comedy, Family Saga
How hard is Wise Children to read?
Wise Children scores 61 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: 55 out of 100
- Carter deploys theatrical and music-hall vocabulary — chorines, greasepaint, adagio dancers, soubrettes, speciality acts — alongside period slang and Shakespearean quotation woven into character speech. The register shifts fluidly between elevated literary diction and Cockney vernacular, demanding attention but never requiring specialist knowledge to follow.
- Sentence structure: 45 out of 100
- The theatrical script format keeps most exchanges short and punchy. Stage directions are declarative sentences. Dora's narration has rhetorical flourish and occasional parallel structures, but nothing approaching Jamesian hypotaxis. Sentences read closer to Fitzgerald's rhythmic balance than to Faulknerian subordination.
- Abstraction: 60 out of 100
- Carter's Shakespearean illegitimacy theme carries sustained philosophical weight — questions of paternity, identity, and who constitutes a legitimate heir run through every scene. Yet the argument is grounded in concrete theatrical action: a dressing room confrontation, a birthday cake with seventeen candles, blood pooling on a stage floor. The abstract is always anchored to the physical.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- Multiple characters across three theatrical generations, a historical backdrop spanning Edwardian music hall through the 1930s, and running Shakespearean intertexts create a dense tapestry. The kinetic theatrical format keeps the pace brisk enough to prevent overload, but a reader tracking all the Hazard family parallels and allusions will find plenty to process.
- Narrative indirection: 60 out of 100
- Dora narrates from age seventy-five, openly acknowledging that some memories cannot be literally true: 'I have a memory, although I know it cannot be a true one.' The theatrical frame — Dora and Nora stepping in and out of their younger selves — means meaning is partly assembled by the audience rather than stated. The retrospective voice mediates everything without explaining it.
- Symbolic density: 72 out of 100
- The title quotes Peregrine directly — 'It is a Wise Child that knows its own father' — signaling the entire novel's concern with legitimacy as both social fact and metaphysical question. Dancing carries sustained symbolic freight as survival, joy, and resistance. The 'wrong side of the tracks' runs as both literal geography and hereditary condition; the Shakespearean crown Melchior fashions from cardboard embodies theatrical pretension and paternal failure simultaneously.
- Ironic distance: 75 out of 100
- Carter maintains fierce carnival irony throughout: the celebrated Shakespearean actor denies his own daughters twice to their faces; the illegitimate Chance girls overflow with the vitality that the 'legitimate' dynasty merely performs. Grandma Chance's frank sex education — delivered from her handbag — exposes bourgeois delicacy as pretension. The gap between what characters claim and what the narrative shows is Carter's primary instrument.
- Resolution withholding: 50 out of 100
- Act One closes with 'What could possibly go wrong?' — Carter's question is genuinely open, inviting audiences to extrapolate from established pattern rather than receive answers. The episodic birthday-scene structure withholds continuity between scenes. Still, the emotional beats are clear and the chronological movement forward provides more closure than Pynchon's radical ambiguity.
- Structural complexity: 65 out of 100
- The theatrical structure creates multiple temporal layers: narrating seventy-five-year-old Dora, young Dora and Nora, show-era Dora and Nora, and the characters they inhabit are all simultaneously present on stage. Scenes jump between decades via birthday cakes. The metatheatrical frame — characters are aware they are performing for an audience — adds a further structural layer without fragmenting into Woolfian or Beckettian obscurity.
How Wise Children is regarded
Wise Children holds a literary regard score of 72 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.