Effi Briest In 1894 the realist masterpiece Effi Briest was published.
Theodor Fontane's novel takes the story of protagonist Effi, the victim of circumstance and weaves a tale of the subordinate role of women in late 19th-century Germany as its subject.
Fontane's taste for withholding action, or at least delaying it improbably, is evident in the novel's most famous feature, a structural gambit of daring subtlety: the frustrated heroine's brief affair with a womanizing officer is never actually described — and is only discovered many years later, when Effi and her husband have settled comfortably into their marriage.
"In Certain Circles" opens with the zest and freshness of Theodor Fontane's great novel "Effi Briest".
Lene suffers less than some of Fontane's women because of her class — because her horizon of expectations is narrower than that of Effi or of Cécile, those unhappy wives of high-ranking husbands.
Like young Effi, like poor Isabel Archer Henry Jamess leans over all of Harrower's work), the irrepressible Zoe Howard will, over the course of the novel, be repressed into an obedient shadow of herself — ground in the very mill of the conventional, as James described the fate of his unfortunate heroine.
In his fiction, love doesn't triumph over class distinctions ("On Tangled Paths"), individual suffering inevitably yields to hard social and political realities ("The Poggenpuhls," "Effi Briest," "Cécile," "The Stechlin"), and climactic reconciliations don't quite take ("Irretrievable").
No one could say that Anna is more vivid than Effi simply because we see Anna doing more thinking.
And I shall be rereading Theodor Fontane's ineffable Effi Briest, in a new translation by Mike Mitchell (Oxford World's Classics £8.99).
They execute their steps with brusque effi ciency, heedless of their enchanter, the man who wanders about with the owl on his head.
