The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch
Published 1973 · 432 pages · 112,285 words · about 8 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is The Black Prince to read?
The Black Prince scores 62 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: 58 out of 100
- Murdoch's vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 58 out of 100
- Murdoch's elaborate prose.
- Abstraction: 68 out of 100
- Art, love, truth.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- London literary.
- Narrative indirection: 65 out of 100
- Unreliable memoir.
- Symbolic density: 65 out of 100
- Hamlet, black prince.
- Ironic distance: 62 out of 100
- Multiple postscripts.
- Resolution withholding: 62 out of 100
- Truth contested.
- Structural complexity: 62 out of 100
- Memoir with postscripts.
How The Black Prince is regarded
The Black Prince holds a literary regard score of 74 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.