The House of Ulloa by Emilia Pardo Bazán
Published 1886 · 110,000 words · about 9 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Classic Literature, Realism
How hard is The House of Ulloa to read?
The House of Ulloa 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: 64 out of 100
- Galician rural vocabulary, hunting and estate terminology, and clerical language, with the Galician dialect preserved in dialogue.
- Sentence structure: 60 out of 100
- Dense nineteenth-century descriptive prose with long periods, though the narrative sections move quickly.
- Abstraction: 48 out of 100
- Concrete and physical — mud, blood, illness, food — with the naturalist thesis about heredity implied rather than argued.
- Information density: 70 out of 100
- A full account of Galician rural society, its electoral corruption, its clergy, its class structure and its economics, across a long novel.
- Narrative indirection: 56 out of 100
- Much of the story arrives through the priest's limited and frightened understanding, and he consistently misreads what he sees.
- Symbolic density: 64 out of 100
- The decaying manor with its ruined archive, the boy fed on brandy and the ivy on the coat of arms carry the degeneration argument.
- Ironic distance: 70 out of 100
- The priest's efforts to bring Christian order to the house cause every disaster in it, and the narrator watches with a cold Galician amusement.
- Resolution withholding: 68 out of 100
- It ends ten years later in a graveyard with the legitimate daughter in rags and the bastard son dressed as a gentleman, and no comment.
- Structural complexity: 48 out of 100
- Linear narration in thirty chapters with a substantial time jump before the final scene.
How The House of Ulloa is regarded
The House of Ulloa 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.