Love and betrayal are the eternal themes of literature, from Tristan and Isolde to Don Giovanni. However, in the middle of the 19th century, a new variant of the old story suddenly emerges in the social novel: infidelity within the bourgeois family. Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, and Effi Briest are the three famous women who engage in the forbidden and risk their entire existence for another man: Emma, the radical gambler; Anna, the passionate lover; and the much too young, naive Effi, who cannot resist fleeting opportunity. Wolfgang Matz follows the stories of these very different women, their husbands, and their lovers in his vibrantly written book, exploring why their private failures, caught between the desire for personal freedom and societal order, concern their creators Gustave Flaubert, Leo Tolstoy, and Theodor Fontane.