For the first few decades of his career, Fontane was known primarily as a poet and travel writer (he published a number of books about his experiences in mid-19th-century England) but he began to publish fiction in his fifties and is now recognized as the first and greatest master of the German realistic novel. Effi Briest, which appeared only a few years before Fontane's death, is his finest work. The central character, reminiscent of Flaubert's Emma Bovary, is a beautiful young woman married to an older man. Effi Briest is only seventeen when she is married off to Baron Geert von Innstetten, a civil servant twice her age. The match, although considered socially suitable, is a disastrous one. Innstetten takes his new bride to a small town on the Baltic coast but his work takes him away for long periods of time and Effi is bored, unhappy and isolated. She becomes perfect prey for the charming but selfish womanizer Crampas and she embarks on a short-lived affair. As the years pass and Innstetten and Effi move to Berlin, her indiscretion looks destined to remain her secret but her husband chances upon old letters between the two lovers and her past returns to ruin her. Innstetten divorces her and society turns its back on her. Husband and former lover fight a duel and Crampas is killed. The rigid morality that governs the lives of all the characters is shown to have destroyed the lives of three of them. Fontane has proved a major influence on German literature in the last century. Thomas Mann declared that Effi Briest was 'one of the six most significant novels ever written' and more recent novelists (Heinrich Boll, for one) show the powerful effect of Fontane's vision of destructively inflexible moral codes continuing in very different social circumstances. His novels, and particularly Effi Briest, deserve a wider readership outside Germany.

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