How long does it take to read The Monk?
The Monk by Matthew Lewis takes about 8 hours 10 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 8 hours 10 minutes
A week or two of reading
First published 1794. 445 pages, about 122,375 words.
17 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 13 hours 36 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 8 hours 10 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 5 hours 6 minutes |
The page count is the median across 64 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
`The Monk was so highly popular that it seemed to create an epoch in our literature', wrote Sir Walter Scott. Set in the sinister monastery of the Capuchins in Madrid, The Monk is a violent tale of ambition, murder, and incest. The great struggle between maintaining monastic vows and fulfilling personal ambitions leads its main character, the monk Ambrosio, to temptation and the breaking of his vows, then to sexual obsession and rape, and finally to murder in order to conceal his guilt. Inspired by German horror romanticism and the work of Ann Radcliffe, Lewis produced his masterpiece at the age of nineteen. It contains many typical Gothic elements - seduction in a monastery, lustful monks, evil Abbesses, bandits and beautiful heroines. But, as the Introduction to this new edition shows, Lewis also played with convention, ranging from gruesome realism to social comedy, and even parodied the genre in which he was writing. This book is intended for students of Gothic Literature and eighteenth-century literature.
Subjects: Fiction, Monks, Monks in fiction, Incest, Rape in fiction, Incest in fiction
