The Book of Her Life by Teresa of Ávila
Published 1588 · 95,000 words · about 8 hours at an average pace · Autobiography, Religion, Classic Literature
How hard is The Book of Her Life to read?
The Book of Her Life scores 64 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: 62 out of 100
- Plain sixteenth-century Castilian, deliberately unlearned, with a technical vocabulary of prayer and a heavy freight of theological caution.
- Sentence structure: 66 out of 100
- Digressive, self-interrupting sentences that lose their thread and say so, written at speed and never revised.
- Abstraction: 72 out of 100
- Alternates concrete autobiography with extended analysis of interior states that have no external referent.
- Information density: 68 out of 100
- Forty years of a life, a full taxonomy of prayer, and the politics of sixteenth-century Spanish religious houses.
- Narrative indirection: 64 out of 100
- Written for confessors who could denounce her, the book constantly hedges, defers to authority and describes her own experiences as those of a person she knows.
- Symbolic density: 70 out of 100
- The garden watered four ways, the angel's golden spear and the silk of the soul give the book its permanent images.
- Ironic distance: 58 out of 100
- Her elaborate self-abasement sits beside an unmistakable authority, and the gap between the two is where the modern reader lives.
- Resolution withholding: 60 out of 100
- The book stops rather than concludes, with Teresa still under examination and still uncertain what her confessors will decide about her.
- Structural complexity: 58 out of 100
- Chronological autobiography interrupted by a long treatise on prayer inserted whole in the middle.
How The Book of Her Life is regarded
The Book of Her Life holds a literary regard score of 79 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.