Effi Briest

Effi Briest is seventeen, still swinging in the garden at Hohen-Cremmen, when her mother calls her indoors to be engaged to a man more than twice her age, once her mother's own suitor. In the grey Baltic town where Baron Innstetten takes her, an old ghost story haunting the house keeps her awake longer than her husband's attentions do, and it is years before a brief affair with Major Crampas gives her one season that feels entirely her own. The unbearable part of Theodor Fontane's novel is not the affair, ended almost as soon as it began, but what follows: Innstetten finds the old letters years later, admits he feels no jealousy or hatred, nothing personal at all, and challenges Crampas to a duel regardless, because honor, dead in him already, still has to be obeyed. For that dead code, Effi loses her husband, her daughter, and her place among people who once loved her, and only at the very end, back in the garden where she began, does anyone dare ask whether the fault was ever truly hers.