Beyond Atonement, loosely based on an actual event in a high-class Austrian family, is a novel about adultery: Maria marries Hermann Dornach, though she is in love with Felix Tessin; two years later, she commits adultery with Tessin, conceiving a child whom she alone knows to be illegitimate; when her husband and their legitimate son die in an accident, she reveals her infidelity. Her unforgiving family and her own remorse set Maria apart from the protagonists of other nineteenth-century novels of adultery such as Goethe's Elective Affinities and Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.