The Story Archive

Effi Briest

Theodor Fontane · 1895 CE · Novel · German · Victorian

A seventeen-year-old is married off to a Prussian official twice her age who had once courted her mother, and taken to a bleak Baltic garrison town where a story about a Chinese ghost on the upstairs landing is the closest thing she has to company. Her husband is correct, dutiful and almost always elsewhere. Fontane's late masterpiece is the German answer to the European adultery novel, and Thomas Mann revered it.

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