Effi Briest

Theodor Fontane's Effi Briest appeared as a book in 1895. It is a realist novel of Prussian society, and it belongs with Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary among the nineteenth-century books that take a marriage and an affair as their subject.

Effi is seventeen, the daughter of a German aristocrat, and she is married to Baron Geert von Innstetten, who is thirty-eight. He had once courted her mother, and was turned down for a man of better position, which he has since acquired; Effi, who is drawn to status, accepts him.

The couple move to Kessin, an invented Pomeranian port, where her husband spends weeks at a time away from home and the local nobility keep their distance. Effi finds one friend, and the house she lives in may be haunted; when she raises the possibility her husband mocks her fears, because the ridicule he would face if people knew of them would hold back his career. Into this comes Major Crampas, a married womaniser whose attentions she enjoys more than she should.