On holiday at a fashionable German spa, young civil engineer Herr von Gordon meets Colonel von St Arnaud and his younger wife, the beautiful Cécile. Gordon is drawn to this elegant and melancholy woman, who seems to hold herself at a distance from her husband. As he and the married pair tour local attractions and enjoy the scenery of the Harz Mountains, he finds himself ever more fascinated by Cécile - and by the mystery surrounding her past.As Gordon and Cécile grow closer, her husband's jealousy, the gossip of polite society, and the secrets of the past converge. When they meet again in Berlin society, the attraction between the two young people will have tragic consequences for all.A challenge to societal conventions, a portrait of a complex woman and a biting send-up of early tourist culture, Fontane's novel is an elegant, ironic and moving classic of 19th-century realist fiction.



Theodor Fontane (1819-98) was born in a small Prussian town. He worked for most of his life as a journalist, and spent many years in London as a foreign correspondent for the Prussian intelligence agency. He began writing novels at the age of fifty-seven, and these works earned him an enduring reputation in German letters. Several of his realist masterpieces are published or forthcoming from Pushkin Press, including No Way Back, On Tangled Paths and his masterpiece Effi Briest.STANLEY RADCLIFFE (1922-2019) was a Germanist and translator who championed the works of Theodor Fontane. His critical guide to Effi Briest was published by Grant & Cutler in 1987. He also translated Gerhart Hauptmann's naturalist novella of 1888 Bahnwärter Thiel as Lineman Thiel (1989).



No writer of the past or the present awakens in me the sympathy and gratitude, the unconditional and instinctive delight, the immediate amusement and warmth and satisfaction that I feel in every verse, in every line of one of his letters, in every snatch of his dialogue



A master of characterization and delicate plotting



"There is also in Fontane ... a Montaigne-like equipoise, a sunny melancholy, an investment in domestic family life......His women are fully-drawn individuals capable of living outside their husbands' shadows...



"clearly the greatest German novelist before Thomas Mann,"



Cécile, a flawed woman ... seems to live and breathe in these pages as she walks slowly around the hotel grounds like some delicate, fragile and rare hot house flower



a subtle yet potent exploration of female constraint in 19th-century Prussian society ...The rigid codes of 'polite society' are peeled away as the story progresses, culminating in a striking denouement... Elegant and quietly subversive, Cécile is a compelling, if sometimes challenging, meditation on gender, power, and perception in 19th-century Germany



He has been called the first European German novelist: he did turn German fiction ... toward the novel of society, with its manners, traditions, hierarchies, and historic tensions. None of this would matter except to German literature scholars, were it not that he is an uncommonly interesting writer whose novels continue to be so pleasurable to read.