Effi Briest

by Theodor Fontane, Hugh Rorrison, Helen Chambers (Afterword)

Overview

Fontane's enchanting seventeen-year-old heroine, Effi, is married off to Geert von Innstetten, an austere, workaholic civil servant twice her age. Set in Bismarck's Germany, this luminous and moving tale of a socially suitable but emotionally disastrous match, shifts from childhood idyll in Brandenburg, to a remote Baltic port and back to Imperial Berlin.

With Effi Briest, Fontane brilliantly demonstrates the truth of his comment that 'women's stories are generally far more interesting'. His taut, ironic narrative depicts a world where sexuality and the will to enjoy life are stifled by narrow-mindedness and circumstance. And in his humane, unsentimental portrait of Effi, who refuses to bow to convention, he offers us a reading experience that is at once touching and unsettling.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781805331605
Publisher:	Steerforth Press
Publication date:	09/03/2024
Series:	Pushkin Press Classics
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	823 KB

About the Author

Mike Mitchell has translated numerous works of German fiction, for which he has eight times been shortlisted for prizes; his translation of Herbert Rosendorfer's Letters Back to Ancient China won the Schegel-Tieck Prize in 1998. He has translated Kafka's The Trial and Musil's The Confusions of Young Törless for Oxford World's Classics.

Ritchie Robertson's books include Kafka: Judaism, Politics, and Literature(OUP, 1985), Kafka: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2004, and Mock Epic Poetry from Pope to Heine (OUP, 2009). He has translated Kafka's The Man who Disappeared and Hoffmann's The Golden Pot and Other Stories for Oxford World's Classics, and introduced and annotated five volumes by Kafka and Musil's The Confusions of Young Törless.

Table of Contents

	Introduction	vii
	Translators' Note	3
	Effi Briest	5
	Notes	219

Editorial Reviews

This superb new translation at last enables English readers to enjoy the novel.

Times London