Ethan Frome
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First published in 1911, Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome is a stark, haunting tale of thwarted desire and lives narrowed by circumstance, set amid the snowbound farms and unforgiving winters of rural Massachusetts. Its story emerges through an unnamed narrator’s attempts to understand Ethan Frome, a taciturn, physically damaged man whose past conceals a desperate love for Mattie Silver, the young cousin of his ailing wife, Zeena. In the austere world of Starkfield, poverty, duty and social isolation press upon every choice, turning private longing into a tragedy of almost unbearable inevitability.
More restrained in scope than Wharton’s great novels of New York society, Ethan Frome reveals the same incisive understanding of the forces that govern human lives, here rendered through a landscape as cold and constricted as the characters’ circumstances. Its spare prose, intricate framing narrative and terrible emotional intensity give the novella the force of a modern tragedy, while its attention to rural poverty and women’s limited choices complicates any simple reading of its central love story. Among Wharton’s most enduring works, it remains a masterpiece of atmosphere, moral ambiguity and the quiet devastation of lives denied their possibilities.
From the book
“She had the look of one who has been living in a world of dreams and has now awakened to the cold reality.”
— Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome
On Ethan Frome
“Not since Hawthorne has a novelist built on the New England soil a tragedy of such elevation of mood as this.”
— Carl Van Doren, quoted in Encyclopedia.com