PERFECT FOR FANS OF JANE AUSTEN: A seamstress and cavalry officer fall in love across class
divides in this "sparkling tender delicately ironic" portrait of 19th-century Berlin. ( New
York Review of Books ) "A joy for its humanity subtlety and visual immediacy."-- Independent
From Germany's greatest 19th-century novelist Theodor Fontane this realist masterpiece
interrogates the strict social codes of a rapidly changing era through a wistful struggle
between love and obligation. Lene is an orphaned seamstress Botho is a nobleman and an officer
in one of the Prussian army's most glittering regiments. But despite their differences of class
and education they fall quickly in love spending a summer together in a clear-eyed tender
love affair before society's demands force them cruelly apart. Now married to a wealthy cousin
Botho learns years later that Lene too has an opportunity to marry. Her ex-lover must choose
between holding on to regret or letting go of the past - along with the possibility of getting
Lene herself back. Unusually progressive for literature of the period this masterwork of
Fontane's portrays a love story that defies class boundaries full of tender irony and vivid
evocations of a quickly expanding Berlin and its bucolic surroundings. Fontane bring sharp
psychological insight to his achingly sympathetic portrayal of two lovers torn between their
hearts and the obligations of social circumstance.
