This brief 106 page novella will capture your sense of irrational Fear within the first two pages. The build up of guilt is relentless. It pounds and pounds at your conscience until you can find no way to escape Irene’s infidelity to a loving husband and her children except for the dastardly plan she has conjured up for herself — suicide.

This is the stuff of melodrama: the typical Zweigian scenario in which, beneath the trappings of respectability, storms of carnal passion, guilt and shame rage. It is no accident, you feel, that Zweig was writing at the same time and in the same city as Sigmund Freud.

But is this "formulaic, thin, swollen and platitudinous"? I suppose there is a formula to this, which can be attested to by the fact that there are at least three film versions of this story, the most famous being by Rossellini. Leaving aside the question of how something can be swollen and thin at the same time, I don't think you can call it platitudinous, unless you count the very notion of the woman haunted by her adultery as a platitude in itself. Zweig picked again and again at this weeping scab, of how to indulge desire in a society which asserted the importance of denying it.