Effi Briest (Penguin Classics)

Description

Unworldly young Effi Briest is married off to Baron von Innstetten, an austere and ambitious civil servant twice her age, who has little time for his new wife. Isolated and bored, Effi finds comfort and distraction in a brief liaison with Major Crampas, a married man with a dangerous reputation. But years later, when Effi has almost forgotten her affair, the secret returns to haunt her - with fatal consequences. In taut, ironic prose Fontane depicts a world where sexuality and the will to enjoy life are stifled by vain pretences of civilization, and the obligations of circumstance. Considered to be his greatest novel, this is a humane, unsentimental portrait of a young woman torn between her duties as a wife and mother and the instincts of her heart.

First Sentence

To the front of Hohen-Cremmen, country seat of the von Briest family since the time of Elector Georg Wilhelm, bright sunshine fell on the midday silence in the village street, while on the side facing the park and gardens a wing built on at right angles cast its broad shadow first on a white and green flagstone path, then out over a large roundel of flowers with a sundial at its centre and a border of canna lilies and rhubarb round the edge.

Subjects

Other Editions

• Effi Briest (Penguin Classics)Penguin Classics2001-07-03
• Effi BriestVerlag von Th. Knauer Nachf.1896-01-01
• Effi Briest.Kurt Desch1956-01-01
• Effi BriestManesse Verlag ; Conzett & Huber,[1957?]1957-01-01
• Effi BriestHardcoverDroemersche Verlagsanstalt Th. Knaur Nachf.1958-01-01
• Effi Briest.F. Ungar Pub. Co.1966-01-01