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  • Published: 11 July 2013
  • ISBN: 9780141392172
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $32.99

On Tangled Paths




A moving love story and a vivid depiction of Berlin in the 1870s, from Germany's greatest nineteenth-century novelist

Lene is a beautiful, orphaned young seamstress, and Botho is a handsome, aristocratic cavalry officer. They are in love, yet know they have only a short time together as society deems their relationship impossible and refuses to acknowledge the seriousness of their feelings. But while Botho appears to have a glittering life ahead of him, the love he feels may yet be his undoing. Published in 1887, On Tangled Paths caused a scandal on publication with its portrayal of a sexual affair across the classes, and is a taut, flawless masterpiece.

  • Published: 11 July 2013
  • ISBN: 9780141392172
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $32.99

Other books in the series

Maldoror and Poems
On Sparta
Love
Annals
Military Dispatches

About the author

Theodor Fontane

Theodor Fontane, born in Neuruppin in 1819, was descended from French Huguenot settlers in Brandenburg, and was brought up on the Baltic Sea coast of Prussia before spending most of his life in Berlin. He trained as a pharmacist but in 1849 decided to earn his living as a writer. He spent several years as a foreign correspondent in London and his prolific non-fiction out-put includes journalism, poetry, theatre reviews, local travelogues of Berlin's hinterland, unpartisan accounts of Bismarck's wars and two autobiographical works.

He published his first novel, Before the Storm (1878), at the age of 58 and this was followed by sixteen further novels which established his reputation in the twentieth century as Germany's finest realist novelist. Fontane's sensitive portrayals of women's lives in late nineteenth-century society are unsurpassed in European literature. The Woman taken in Adultery (1882), Cécile (1886), Delusions, Confusions (1888), Jenny Teibel (1892) and Effi Briest (1895) focus on problems of love and marriage, while the late works The Poggenphul Family (1896) and The Stechlin (1898) provide humorous family portraits of Prussian society in decline. He died in 1898.

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Praise for On Tangled Paths

On Tangled Paths has the flawless logic and beautiful design of the novella at its best

Paul Binding, The Spectator

There is an undertow of sadness to this novel, yet to read it is a joy, for its humanity, subtlety and visual immediacy

Ruth Pavey, The Independent

Theodor Fontane's first true masterpiece; it has a perfect beginning, a perfect ending, and no superfluous sentence in between

Henry Garland

A tender and wistful love story... [Peter James Bowman's] translation is excellent

Martin Swales, Translation and Literature