On Tangled Paths

By Theodor Fontane

Book Overview

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, 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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1805331612
• ISBN13: 9781805331612
• Release Date: February 2026
• Publisher: Pushkin Press Classics
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.81 lbs.

Customer Reviews

a very great, very quiet novel

Fontane reminds me of Chekhov in that he shows, on the surface, the indifferent passage of time, and also, resisting it, human wishes and desires trying to strike out on their own. Here, Botho, an impoverished young nobleman, is having an affair with Lene, a young working-class woman. So far, typical for the time depicted. The problem is that the two of them love each other, and it is this love, as it fights or adapts to the currents of their lives, that transforms them and the novel.