Goethe had lived with Christiane Vulpius for eighteen years before he married her in 1806. Less than two years later he fell in love with a young girl.
Elective Affinities reflects the conflict which Goethe felt between his high regard for the idea of marriage and his experience of spontaneous passion. Set in the German countryside of the early nineteenth century, the novel depicts the emotional turmoil into which Eduard and Charlotte are thrown by the introduction into their comfortably idle lives of two fresh faces.
The novel - whose strange title stems from a current scientific theory - was widely assumed to argue for the chemical origin of love and thus condemned as immoral when it was first published. Written in the form of the classic German Novelle, this darkly symbolic tale conveys the conflicting loyalties of Goethe's heart as well as being an ironic portrait of the landed nobility.
