Writing Lives by Leon Edel
Published 1984 · 270 pages · 74,000 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is Writing Lives to read?
Writing Lives scores 49 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. 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: 62 out of 100
- Psychoanalytic vocabulary alongside standard literary-critical terms; accessible to readers with basic Freudian background.
- Sentence structure: 57 out of 100
- Abstraction: 72 out of 100
- Moves between general principles and specific examples from Edel's own biographical practice.
- Information density: 73 out of 100
- Substantial theoretical content interspersed with illustrative examples from literary biography.
- Narrative indirection: 16 out of 100
- Edel often develops his principles through retrospective narrative of his own research problems.
- Symbolic density: 16 out of 100
- The 'figure under the carpet' metaphor is both theoretical concept and governing symbol.
- Ironic distance: 14 out of 100
- Occasional irony about biographers who mistake accumulation of facts for understanding of a life.
- Resolution withholding: 14 out of 100
- Each chapter states its principle clearly; the book reaches an explicit conclusion about biography's possibilities.
- Structural complexity: 38 out of 100
- Thematic chapter organization covers the full range of biography's problems; structure is clear and logical.
How Writing Lives is regarded
Writing Lives holds a literary regard score of 84 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.