Effi Briest

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Effi Briest is only seventeen when she is married off to Baron von Instetten, travelling to live with him in a provincial town on the remote Baltic coast of Prussia. He is twenty y ears her senior, an ambitious bureaucrat who is uninterested in his young wife, and lively Effi becomes increasingly isolated, bored and anxious in her stifling surroundings. A half-hearted affair with Major Crampas – a manipulative married man with a reputation for womanising – temporarily distracts Effi from her loneliness. But years later, this brief liaison will return to Effi with devastating consequences. In this witty masterpiece of poetic realism, Fontane portrays a woman torn between her own desires and her roles as wife and mother, between her heart and the obligations of social circumstance. Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe. Translated by Hugh Rorrison and Helen Chambers. Show more