EFFI BRIEST SUMMARY FULL

It’s almost all pretty deadly, so it’s no wonder that Effi is soon thinking back to the innocent pleasures and freedoms of her previous life. As the local Landrat – a post of some importance, if only locally – he is expected to make the rounds of the neighbouring gentry and minor aristocracy with his new wife. When she shows a little too much glee at the prospect of a new cosmopolitan experience, he tells her not to get her hopes up.

EFFI BRIEST SUMMARY FULL

Not only that, the little port where she now lives is full of people who started off elsewhere. Now she’s having to become familiar with Pomeranian ways, and her husband has warned her that they are different.

For Effi it’s Havelland to the west of Berlin.

But this is a Germany only a few years after unification, and there’s a far greater sense than in England of the Land of one’s birth. Whatever, Effi’s journey is presented in the context of the class she was born into – in England her parents would be pillars of the local gentry, at about the level of a typical Jane Austen milieu almost a century earlier: the house is ‘the country seat of the von Briest family’. I wonder – although I suppose I’m jumping the gun – if this focus on the individual consciousness is what attracted Thomas Mann to this particular novel. (I’ll come back to this self-censorship of hers with regard to what is or isn’t suitable for Innstetten to hear.) Or, in a long letter presented verbatim in Chapter 12, she confesses a lot of her misgivings to her mother. Later she talks to her husband – or her maid Johanna if her thoughts don’t seem suitable for discussion with him. In the early chapters she talks things over with her friends and mother. Fontane makes sure that the reader is left in no doubt not only about her first impressions, but about the way she processes these and presents her thoughts to others. The novel is mostly told from Effi’s point of view, and she is the key character in almost every scene so far. Only weeks into their new life, she has to muster all the energy and spirit that seemed to make her so attractive to Baron von Innstetten in order to disguise her loneliness and sense of alienation. Effi has talked, among other things, about how ambitious she is, but she knows nothing of the world. He is a hardworking, dutiful civil servant whose star appears to be rising. He is a clever, handsome older man who would have proposed to her mother if he’d had the chance maybe twenty years previously. And yet, in this first one-third of the novel, what do we have? A young bride – the first chapter or two focus on her girlish games and habits before any thoughts of marriage – finds herself in the inconvenient residence of her new husband, in the fictitious town of Kessin on the north coast of Germany. Except that it arrives covered in praise: Thomas Mann declared that if six indispensable novels were to be selected, according to whatever criteria, this would have to be one of them. It’s interesting to pick up a novel you know absolutely nothing about.

Effi briest summary