Count Petöfy: A Novel of Austria-Hungary (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture #256)

First English translation of an unjustly overlooked novel by the great German realist novelist Theodor Fontane.


Set in Austria and Hungary in the 1870s, this novel is the story of Count Adam Petöfy, a lifelong bachelor, who at age seventy, unexpectedly proposes marriage to a young actress, Franziska Franz. He explains that he is only looking for companionship and affectionate regard - apart from this, he will give Franziska carte blanche. Despite their differences of age, class, and background, they marry. Adam takes Franziska, now Countess Petöfy, from Vienna to his family's ancestral estates in the Hungarian countryside. Here they begin their new life: a life of ease and privilege - but later, of struggles which neither has anticipated.

Count Petöfy has been a neglected book, even in Germany, and has been overshadowed by Fontane's celebrated "Berlin" novels, such as Effi Briest. This first-ever English translation will allow a wider audience to read and study Count Petöfy for its exploration of missteps and the limits of self-realization, of questions of gender and social convention, of honour and duty; and for a narrative craft that reveals and conceals at the same time. The translation is bookended by contributions from two noted Fontane scholars: a contextualizing introduction by Brian Tucker, who has written on Count Petöfy before, and an afterword by Helen Chambers on the novel's relationship to the novelist's other works.