Book description
"A perfect translation of a near-perfect novella of bourgeois
adultery and guilt."-Jonathan Bate, Times Literary
Supplement, Book of the Year 2010
Finding her
comfortable bourgeois existence as wife and mother predictable after
eight years of marriage, Irene Wagner brings a little excitement
into it by starting an affair with a rising young pianist. Her
lover's former mistress begins blackmailing her, threatening to give
her secret away to her husband. Irene is soon in the grip of
agonizing fear. Written in the spring of 1913, and first published
in 1920, this novella is one of Stefan Zweig's most powerful studies
of a woman's mind and emotions. La Paura (1954) the Roberto
Rossellini film based on the Stefan Zweig novel Fear was the last of
the extraordinary features in which Rossellini directed Ingrid
Bergman, his wife.
STEFAN ZWEIG was born in 1881 in Vienna, a member of a well-to-do
Austrian-Jewish family. He studied in Berlin and Vienna and was first
known as a poet and translator, then as a biographer. Zweig travelled
widely, living in Salzburg between the wars, and enjoyed literary fame.
His stories and novellas were collected in 1934. In the same year, with
the rise of Nazism, he briefly moved to London, taking British
citizenship. After a short period in New York; he settled in Brazil
where in 1942 he and his wife were found dead in an apparent double
suicide. ANTHEA BELL is the recipient of the Schlegel Tieck Prize for
translation from German, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and the
Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize in 2002 for the translation of W. G. Sebald's
Austerlitz, and the 2003 Austrian State Prize for Literary Translation.
She lives in Cambridge, England.
