Cover of The Secret Garden
Reading time

How long does it take to read The Secret Garden?

by Frances Hodgson Burnett

At an average pace

6h 4m

91,025 words at 250 a minute

At 30 minutes a day, you would finish in about 13 days.

That is 12 sessions with The Secret Garden.

How fast do you read?
30

45 minutes a day would finish it in about 9 days.

How we worked this out

The Secret Garden is about 91,025 words, estimated from its 331 pages at about 275 words a page. At 250 words a minute, that comes to 6 hours 4 minutes.

Most reading-time sites default to 300 words a minute. The best evidence we could find, a 2019 meta-analysis of 190 studies by Marc Brysbaert, puts silent adult reading of English prose closer to 238 words a minute for non-fiction and 260 for fiction. We use 250. It is slower than the number you will see elsewhere, and it is closer to how people actually read.

This is still a model, not a measurement. When enough ReadersGuild readers have finished The Secret Garden, we will replace this estimate with the time they actually took.

The Secret Garden at a glance

Pages
331
Author
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Genre
children

Knowing the number is the easy part.

The hours are the hard part, and they are easier with company. ReadersGuild is where people read The Secret Garden alongside each other, one session at a time.

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