Book 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. Considered to
be Fontane's greatest novel, Effi Briest is a humane, unsentimental
portrait of a young woman torn between her duties as a wife and mother
and the instincts of her heart.
Theodor Fontane (1819-98) was a German novelist and potitical
reporter. Along with EFFI BRIEST, Fontane is remembered for FRAU JENNY
TREIBEL (1892), an ironic criticism of middle-class hypocrisy and small-mindedness.
Hugh Rorrison has published extensively on modern German theatre and
teaches German film at the University of Leeds. Helen Chambers
organised the first conference on English translations of Fontane in
1992 and teaches German at the University of St Andrews.
