Elective Affinities (Translated by Hollingdale 1971)

✍ Scribed by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

• Publisher: Penguin Books; Penguin Group
• Year: 1809
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 168 KB
• Edition: Penguin Books (2005)
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN: 0140442421

✦ Synopsis

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Paperback, 304 pages
Published: 1809
Edition: Penguin Books (2005)
Translated from the German with an Introduction by: R. J. Hollingdale (1969)
Chronology and Further Reading by: David Deissner (2005)
Condemned as immoral when it was first published, this novel reflects the conflict Goethe felt between his respect for the conventions of marriage and the possibility of spontaneous passion.
Elective Affinities was written when Goethe was sixty and long established as Germany's literary giant. It is a penetrating study of marriage and passion, bringing together four people in an inexorable manner. The novel asks whether we have free will or not and confronts its characters with the monstrous consequences of repressing what little "real life" they have in themselves, a life so far removed from their natural states that it appears to them as something terrible and destructive.