How long does it take to read Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell?
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke takes about 15 hours 50 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 15 hours 50 minutes
A long haul
First published 2001. 864 pages, about 237,600 words.
32 days (about 5 weeks) at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 26 hours 24 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 15 hours 50 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 9 hours 54 minutes |
The page count is the median across 51 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Published in 2004, it is an alternative history set in 19th-century England around the time of the Napoleonic Wars. Its premise is that magic once existed in England and has returned with two men: Gilbert Norrell and Jonathan Strange. Centred on the relationship between these two men, the novel investigates the nature of "Englishness" and the boundaries between reason and unreason, Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Dane, and Northern and Southern English cultural tropes/stereotypes. It has been described as a fantasy novel, an alternative history, and a historical novel. It inverts the Industrial Revolution conception of the North-South divide in England: in this book the North is romantic and magical, rather than rational and concrete.
Subjects: England, fiction, Fiction, historical, Fiction, historical, general, Fantasy fiction, Fairies, Fiction
