Man,
I heard about this story because it's supposed to be one of those perfect things that all wanna be authors should seek. I read it and wasn't disappointed at all. Long before Hemingway taught us all to use taut language, von Kleist was on top of it. It's fast. It's furious. It's fun. It's also highly recommended.

I've written a plot summary of the story that I'll include as a link, but you should really give it a read yourself. Marquise of O plot summary ( )

The Hesperus edition brings together three wonderful stories by Kleist: "The Marquise of O-," "The Earthquake in Chile," and "The Foundling." Here there is a very dark vision of human society: the parents who banish their daughter because she has somehow become pregnant; lovers who are sentenced to prison and death and then are saved by the earthquake only to be murdered by a mob driven to religious frenzy; and a grown orphan who out of spite, and revenge for a perceived insult, ruins the lives of his foster parents. Only "The Marquise of O-" offers a "happy ending", which seems to be a result of its comical, at times even farcical elements. The culprit in all these tales is over-strict morality or religious hypocrisy, supported by society and the church; the failings and lapses of individual humans can be forgiven "in consideration of the fragile nature of the world" ("The Marquise of O-"). The translation by Richard Stokes is very fluid. My only objection was his decision to translate "Bigotterie" in "The Foundling" as "bigotry" (one of the orphan Nicolo's failings); Kleist was surely using this word in a sense lost to its English cognate, to mean religious hypocrisy. ( )