The fisherman explains that years ago, their young daughter was lost in the lake and apparently drowned, but that same day, Undine appeared on their doorstep.

During their time together, Huldbrand and Undine fall in love, although she continues to behave erratically and can seemingly control the weather.

The sailors and servants become suspicious of Undine as she magically stops these attacks, and Huldbrand begins to resent her.

Seeing this as a sign that Undine is colluding with the spirits, Huldbrand throws the coral necklace overboard and accuses her of being a sorceress.

The story was inspired by the works of the occultist Paracelsus, who coined the term "undine" (from Lithuanian language word Vandene (water=vanduo)).

[1] Paracelsus's Book on Nymphs states that undines can gain an immortal soul by marrying a human.

[2] Fouqué may have been more directly influenced by the Comte de Gabalis, a Rosicrucian novel which adapted Paracelsus's ideas.

[3] Another model was probably the 1798 opera Das Donauweibchen, which—like Undine—is set around the Danube and features a love triangle between a man, a woman, and a water nymph.

[5] An unabridged English translation of the story by William Leonard Courtney and illustrated by Arthur Rackham was published in 1909.

[8] The references to Undine in such works as Charlotte Mary Yonge's The Daisy Chain and Louisa Alcott's Little Women show that it was one of the best loved of all books for many 19th-century children.

It was a collaboration between Hoffmann, who composed the score, and Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué who adapted his own work into a libretto.

The opera proved highly successful, and Carl Maria von Weber praised it in his review as the kind of composition which the German desires: "an art work complete in itself, in which partial contributions of the related and collaborating arts blend together, disappear, and, in disappearing, somehow form a new world".

[9][10] In the 1830s, the novella was translated into Russian dactylic hexameter verse by the Romantic poet Vasily Zhukovsky.

In one of his letters he stated, "I have not, like de la Motte Fouqué in Undine, allowed the mermaid's acquiring of an immortal soul to depend upon an alien creature, upon the love of a human being.

This was based on a scene in Jean Giraudoux's 1938 play adaptation, Ondine, in which the dying love interest describes his difficulty breathing.

[12] Medical literature frequently misunderstood the play and thus confused the symptoms of the disorder, leading to criticism of the name.