Reading Order
WertherThe Sorrows of Young Werther Reading Order
The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is the founding text of European literary Romanticism — the novel that created the first great Romantic hero and caused what contemporary observers called 'Werther fever' across Europe: young men dressing in Werther's blue coat and yellow vest, carrying copies of the book, and in documented cases taking their own lives in imitation of the novel's ending. Goethe wrote it in four weeks in 1774, when he was 24, drawing on his own unrequited love for Charlotte Buff (who was engaged to another man) and the suicide of his friend Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem (whose pistols Goethe borrowed to compose the death scene). The novel is told in epistolary form — letters from Werther to his friend Wilhelm — and follows the hypersensitive, artistically gifted Werther as he falls hopelessly in love with Lotte, who is betrothed to the solid, practical Albert, and eventually shoots himself. Goethe himself later described the novel with some ambivalence — he felt he had 'shot himself out of' his own suicidal tendencies by writing it, but was disturbed by the imitative suicides it inspired, and in 1787 revised the novel to add a 'Preface' warning against Werther-worship. The influence on European Romanticism was enormous and immediate: Napoleon carried a copy to Egypt, Keats wore a Werther costume, and the entire tradition of the sensitive Romantic hero who cannot adapt his passions to the world — René, Adolphe, Harold, Onegin — descends from Werther.
Where to start
The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) — the Penguin Classics edition translated by Michael Hulse (1989) is the most readable modern translation; the Oxford World's Classics edition translated by David Constantine (1994) is more scholarly. Short (about 140 pages in most editions) and best read in sequence — don't read ahead, let the letters build their atmosphere of enclosure and inevitability.
Complete Werther Book List
- 1Buy
The Sorrows of Young Werther (Penguin Classics)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (trans. Michael Hulse)·1989·The most readable modern translation — Hulse captures the emotional immediacy of Werther's letters without archaic stiffness; the introduction gives the essential biographical context (the Charlotte Buff affair, the Jerusalem suicide) and the novel's extraordinary immediate influence across Europe. - 2Buy
Elective Affinities
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe·1809·Goethe's later and more formally perfect novel — where Werther is all emotion and no social context, Elective Affinities gives passion a social setting (a married couple, a ménage, a country estate) and examines it with scientific detachment; the most important development of Goethe's novelistic art after Werther. - 3Buy
René
François-René de Chateaubriand·1802·The French successor to Werther that translated the German Romantic mode into a Catholic and colonial context — René's 'vague des passions' is Werther's emotional oversensitivity given a French philosophical name; the most direct French response to Werther's emotional world. - 4Buy
Adolphe
Benjamin Constant·1816·The French psychological novel that analyzes with cold precision what Werther felt with hot passion — where Werther drowns in feeling, Adolphe dissects feeling; reading both together shows the transformation of the German Romantic original into the French analytical mode. - 5Buy
A Hero of Our Time
Mikhail Lermontov·1840·The Russian novel that is the most penetrating literary analysis of the Romantic hero descended from Werther — Pechorin is what Werther looks like a generation later, with the naivety burned away and replaced by self-awareness and cynicism; the most intelligent critique of the Wertherian type in European fiction.
Werther — Frequently Asked Questions
What is The Sorrows of Young Werther about?
The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is an epistolary novel told through letters from Werther, a hypersensitive young artist, to his friend Wilhelm. Werther falls hopelessly in love with Lotte, who is betrothed to the practical Albert; unable to accept the impossibility of their love and increasingly consumed by a vague existential despair, Werther eventually shoots himself. The novel is the founding text of European literary Romanticism and created the first great Romantic hero — the figure of extraordinary sensitivity who cannot adapt his passions to the world as it is.
Did The Sorrows of Young Werther cause suicides?
The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) by Goethe caused what contemporaries called 'Werther fever' across Europe — young men dressing in Werther's blue coat and yellow vest, carrying copies of the book, and in some documented cases taking their own lives in imitation of the novel's ending. The phenomenon is one of the earliest documented cases of what psychologists now call 'copycat suicide.' Goethe was disturbed by the suicides and in 1787 revised the novel to add a preface warning against Werther-worship. He later said that writing Werther had been therapeutic for himself — he 'shot himself out of' his own suicidal tendencies through the act of composition.
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