Theodor Fontane (1819–1898) was a German novelist and poet from Neuruppin in Brandenburg, of Huguenot descent. He trained and worked as an apothecary, like his father, before turning to journalism, serving as a correspondent in London and writing travel books on the Mark Brandenburg and war histories. He began writing novels only in his late fifties; Effi Briest, Irrungen, Wirrungen and Der Stechlin made him the leading German realist novelist of the 19th century.
Effi Briest opens at Hohen-Cremmen, the Brandenburg estate of the Briest family, where seventeen-year-old Effi, playful and still half a child, is suddenly engaged to Baron Geert von Innstetten, a thirty-eight-year-old district administrator who long ago courted her mother. Effi accepts, partly from ambition and partly from a wish for excitement, and the couple marry and move to Kessin, a small Baltic resort town in Pomerania.
