What Maisie Knew by Henry James
Published 1897 · 88,550 words · about 6 hours at an average pace
How hard is What Maisie Knew to read?
What Maisie Knew scores 68 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: 70 out of 100
- Late-James vocabulary, abstract and evasive.
- Sentence structure: 88 out of 100
- Extremely convoluted sentences with deferred subjects.
- Abstraction: 75 out of 100
- Adult treachery rendered through a mind that cannot name it.
- Information density: 65 out of 100
- Little event, heavily loaded prose.
- Narrative indirection: 82 out of 100
- Everything reaches the reader through a child who understands the words but not the meanings.
- Symbolic density: 55 out of 100
- Restrained; the difficulty is in the filter, not the figures.
- Ironic distance: 82 out of 100
- Constant gap between what Maisie reports and what the reader infers.
- Resolution withholding: 62 out of 100
- The ending refuses to say what Maisie has become.
- Structural complexity: 45 out of 100
- Linear.
How What Maisie Knew is regarded
What Maisie Knew holds a literary regard score of 81 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.