Effi Briest
- 318
- Pages
- about 6 h
- Reading time
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Editor’s note Theodor Fontane wrote it in his seventies; it was serialised in 1894–95 and published as a book in 1896. It draws on a real case, the affair of Elisabeth von Ardenne, which ended in a duel in 1886. Effi is married at seventeen to Baron Innstetten, who had once courted her mother. It is standard school reading in Germany, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder filmed it in 1974.
About the book
Effi Briest is a realist novel by Theodor Fontane, published in book form in 1895. It can be thematically compared to other novels on 19th-century marriage from a female perspective, such as Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary, which are also adultery tragedies.
Reader voices
The most-liked reviews on Hardcover (credited to their authors).
“The story is a simple one. Unhappy marriage, adultery, tragedy. The novel is a classic perhaps because it predicted the doom of Prussian society a couple of decades early. Would Effi have landed a in a world of trouble half a century later? a doubt it.”