ARGONAUT BOOKS

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...Read More