Mathilde Möhring

"Mathilde Möhring" is Theodor Fontane's last novel, left unfinished at his death in 1898 and published posthumously in 1906. It follows Mathilde, an ambitious, clear-eyed young woman from modest Berlin circumstances who marries the passive, sickly law student Hugo Großmann.

Recognizing that Hugo lacks the drive to build a career on his own, Mathilde effectively manages his studies and his life, pushing him through his examinations and into a position as a small-town mayor. The novel is a spare, unsentimental study of a woman whose intelligence and will find no legitimate outlet in Wilhelmine-era Germany except through the man she has married — and what happens to her once he no longer needs managing. It is often read as one of Fontane's most modern character studies, anticipating later feminist readings of the constrained "New Woman."