Theodor Fontane hesitated to publish his late novel Mathilde Möhring because he believed it was too subtle and spare for the popular taste of the day. Published posthumously in 1906, its themes - corrosive economic precarity, the ambivalence of marriage for women, and the burden of work expectations for men - resonate uncannily with readers today. The heroine Mathilde and her mother cling to the underside of the lower middle class by renting out a room in their small Berlin apartment. Their new tenant seems to offer a path to middle-class security, so although marriage is not her first choice, Mathilde applies her shrewd understanding of class mores to pursue it - with results both triumphant and catastrophic.
The last among Fontane's powerfully drawn female protagonists, Mathilde is unlike any previous heroine of a German novel: intelligent and energetic but plain and deeply pragmatic. We follow the fearless but flawed Mathilde from the bustling metropolis of Berlin to Woldenstein, a sleepy backwater town she single-handedly transforms, and back. Unknown in the English-speaking world, this compact work has the humor and pathos familiar to readers of Fontane, and is powerfully evocative of the politics of class, gender, and religion in late 19th-century Germany. An introduction, afterword, and extensive endnotes richly contextualize the work for both general readers and students of literature, history, gender studies, and German studies.