Recommendations
Books Like Effi Briest
What to read after Effi Briest by Theodor Fontane
Theodor Fontane's Effi Briest (1895) is the masterwork of German literary realism — a seventeen-year-old girl married to a much older Prussian official, destroyed by the social consequences of a brief affair that ended years before her destruction. Thomas Mann called it one of the six greatest novels ever written. These novels will find you in the same territory.
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Madame Bovary
by Gustave Flaubert
Emma Bovary in provincial France — the French predecessor to Effi Briest in the tradition of the nineteenth-century novel about a married woman destroyed by an adulterous affair; where Fontane is tender and elegiac toward Effi, Flaubert is ironic and devastating toward Emma; both are about the gap between romantic expectations and provincial reality, and both were published within forty years of each other
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Anna Karenina
by Leo Tolstoy
Anna Karenina and Vronsky — the third member of the canonical triumvirate (Madame Bovary, Effi Briest, Anna Karenina) of nineteenth-century novels about a married woman destroyed by an adulterous affair; where Fontane focuses on the social machinery that destroys Effi, Tolstoy focuses on the moral and psychological dimensions of Anna's situation and gives it cosmic weight through the Levin subplot
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The Awakening
by Kate Chopin
Edna Pontellier's awakening in 1890s New Orleans — the American companion to Effi Briest published four years after it, in 1899; where Fontane's novel is about a woman destroyed by the social consequences of desire, Chopin's is about a woman who awakens to desire and cannot find any social form for it; both are about the violence that nineteenth-century society did to women's inner lives
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The House of Mirth
by Edith Wharton
Lily Bart's destruction by Gilded Age New York — the American Effi Briest, published ten years later in 1905; where Effi is destroyed by having acted on her desires, Lily is destroyed by never having acted on them; the social mechanisms in both novels are the same (gossip, exclusion, the double standard for men and women) applied in different national contexts
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Buddenbrooks
by Thomas Mann
Four generations of a Lübeck merchant family — Mann, who called Effi Briest one of the greatest novels ever written, published Buddenbrooks six years after it, and the two novels are the twin pillars of German literary realism; where Fontane's novel is compressed and focused on a single woman, Mann's is expansive and focused on a family over four generations
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Cousin Bette
by Honoré de Balzac
Bette Fischer's revenge on the Hulot family — one of the great nineteenth-century French novels of social destruction and the direct predecessor to the tradition Fontane belongs to; where Effi Briest is destroyed by social convention, Balzac's characters destroy each other through passion, jealousy, and money; Balzac is the great novelist of how French society actually works, as Fontane is the great novelist of how Prussian society works
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The Painted Veil
by W. Somerset Maugham
Kitty Fane, a shallow socialite in Hong Kong whose husband takes her to a cholera epidemic as punishment for her adultery — the English Effi Briest in some respects; where Fontane's Effi is innocent of calculating her social situation and is destroyed by it, Maugham's Kitty is not innocent but learns through suffering; both are novels about what marriage and society do to women
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The Kreutzer Sonata
by Leo Tolstoy
Pozdnyshev's confession of the murder of his wife, whom he suspected of adultery — Tolstoy's most extreme treatment of the same jealousy and social convention theme that runs through Effi Briest; much shorter than Anna Karenina and much more violent; where Fontane shows the social destruction of a woman by a husband who feels no real anger, Tolstoy shows a man who murders his wife from jealousy; the two novellas illuminate each other's extremities
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