Set against the bleak Alpine moorland of Mals, The Hour Will Come begins in a world where snow, isolation, and death press hard against the fragile shelter of human mercy. At the Hospice of Saint Valentine, monks and shepherds battle a violent storm to save a woman buried in the drifts with her newborn child, and their rescue becomes a solemn act of faith, tenderness, and courage. In the warmth of the hospice, the dying mother, identified as the noble lady of Reichenberg, tells how she was falsely accused, cast out, and driven to seek refuge for her son, who was dedicated to the Church and must be taken to Abbot Conrad at Marienberg. After her peaceful death, Florentinus carries the infant through the storm to the fortress-like monastery, where Abbot Conrad and the brethren receive him and arrange for the child to be nursed in secrecy and care. Amid the monastery's solemn festival and public ritual, the story widens into a drama of hidden origins, memory, and spiritual conflict. The newly ordained priest Donatus is shaken first by a glimpse of the woman who raised him, then by the awakening of forbidden desire, as beauty, guilt, and devotion collide. Torn between earthly love and religious duty, he ultimately seeks the sternest confession, setting the novel's intense struggle between sin, grace, and redemption in motion. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.

À propos de l'auteur

Hillern, Wilhelmine von

Wilhelmine von Hillern was a German novelist, playwright, and actress born in 1836 into a cultured family that helped shape her broad artistic sensibility, and she spent much of her life moving between the worlds of performance, literature, and public life. After an early career on the stage, she turned to writing and became one of the more widely read German women authors of the nineteenth century, admired for narratives that combined emotional intensity with keen observation of social and moral conflict. Her fiction often explored the pressures placed on women, the tension between duty and desire, the influence of religion and conscience, and the costs of conventional respectability, giving her work a seriousness that still resonates today. She wrote at a time when women’s voices were gaining visibility but were still constrained by expectations, and her ability to dramatize inner struggle made her especially compelling to contemporary readers interested in gender, identity, and the limits of social freedom. Wilhelmine von Hillern’s legacy lies in her talent for weaving accessible storytelling with psychological depth and ethical questioning, creating novels that reflect both the spirit of her era and concerns that remain familiar now. Readers who enjoy nineteenth-century fiction, strong emotional drama, and stories shaped by moral complexity and Alpine or historical atmospheres are especially likely to find her work rewarding.