How long does it take to read The Marquise of O--?
and other stories
The Marquise of O-- by Heinrich von Kleist takes about 5 hours 50 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 5 hours 50 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1959. 318 pages, about 87,450 words.
12 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 9 hours 43 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 5 hours 50 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 3 hours 39 minutes |
The page count is the median across 19 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
From 'The Marquis of O--', in which a woman is made pregnant without her knowledge, to the vivid and inexplicable suffering portrayed in 'The Earthquake in Chile', his stories are those of a man swimming against the tide of the German Enlightenment, unable to believe in the idealistic humanism of his day, and who sees human nature as irrational, ambiguous and baffling. It is this loss of faith, together with his vulnerability and disequilibrium, his pronounced sense of evil, his desperate challenge to established values and beliefs, that carries Kleist more forcefully than Goethe or Schiller across the gap between the eighteenth century and today.
Subjects: Fiction, general, Fiction, short stories (single author)
