Complete and unabridged, with 42 full-page plates by Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein, Johann Conrad Seekatz and Johann Heinrich Tischbein. A young man arrives in a country town, falls in love with a woman already promised to another, and writes letters about it until there is nothing left to write. Goethe was twenty-four; the book made him famous across Europe, was blamed for a wave of imitative suicides, and embarrassed him for the rest of his long life. Its power is the voice — unguarded, self-dramatising, and horribly recognisable. Forty-two plates of children, music-making and torchlit night scenes by painters including Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki and Johann Conrad Seekatz give faces and rooms to Werther's unguarded voice.