Belinda vs The Agony Column: Which Should You Read?
Both live on shelves: Courtship, Young women, Fiction
Belinda
Maria Edgeworth won the admiration of her contemporaries Jane Austen and Walter Scott as well as later writers such as Thackeray and Turgenev. In Belinda (1801) she tackles issues of gender and race in a manner at once…
vs
The Agony Column
London that historic summer was almost unbearably hot. It seems, looking back, as though the big baking city in those days was meant to serve as an anteroom of torture—an inadequate bit of preparation for the hell that…
The verdict
- Ratings are close across the board — any is a safe pick by score.
- The Agony Column is the quickest read — about 2 hours vs 8 for Belinda.
- The Agony Column has the widest readership — 387 ratings behind its score.
- Belinda reaches further in scholarship and criticism — cited 4 times.
How to choose
Scores by source
| Belinda | The Agony Column | |
|---|---|---|
| Goodreads | — | 3.8 (387) |
| Hardcover | 3.0 (6) | 4.0 (1) |
| Apple Books | — | 4.5 (12) |
Reception
| Belinda | The Agony Column | |
|---|---|---|
| Ratings | 6 | 387 |
| Editions | 20 | 31 |
| Citations | 4 | 1 |
| Film adaptations | 1 | — |
| Want to read | — | 176 |
| Reading it now | — | 33 |
| Written reviews | — | 74 |
| Wikipedia attention | 749 | — |
| Pages | 483 | 110 |