How long does it take to read Effi Briest?
Theodor Fontane
Effi Briest by Theodor Fontane takes about 5 hours 50 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 5 hours 50 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1894. 318 pages, about 87,450 words. Written for young adults.
12 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 9 hours 43 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 5 hours 50 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 3 hours 39 minutes |
The page count is the median across 170 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Unworldly young Effi Briest is married off to Baron von Innstetten, an austere and ambitious civil servant twice her age, who has little time for his new wife. Isolated and bored, Effi finds comfort and distraction in a brief liaison with Major Crampas, a married man with a dangerous reputation. But years later, when Effi has almost forgotten her affair, the secret returns to haunt her - with fatal consequences. In taut, ironic prose Fontane depicts a world where sexuality and the will to enjoy life are stifled by vain pretences of civilization, and the obligations of circumstance. Considered to be his greatest novel, this is a humane, unsentimental portrait of a young woman torn between her duties as a wife and mother and the instincts of her heart.
Subjects: Fiction, Social life and customs, Prussian National characteristics, Teenage girls, German fiction, Adultery
