Ethan Frome: with an introduction by Edith Wharton

By Edith Wharton

ETHAN FROME is a novel published in 1911 by the Pulitzer Prize-winning American author Edith Wharton. It is set in the fictitious town of Starkfield, Massachusetts. The novel was adapted into a film, Ethan Frome, in 1993.

ETHAN FROME is set in the fictional New England town of Starkfield, where a visiting engineer tells the story of his encounter with Ethan Frome, a man with a history of thwarted dreams and desires. The accumulated longing of Frome ends in an ironic turn of events. His initial impressions are based on his observations of Frome going about his mundane tasks in Starkfield, and something about him catches the eye and curiosity of the visitor, but no one in the town seems interested in revealing many details about the man or his history-or perhaps they are not able to. The narrator ultimately finds himself in the position of staying overnight at Frome's house in order to escape a winter storm, and from there he observes Frome and his private circumstances, which he shares and which triggers other people in town to be more forthcoming with their own knowledge and impressions.

Ethan Frome was written while Edith Wharton was living at The Mount, her home in Lenox, Massachusetts. Wharton likely based the story on an accident that she had heard about in 1904 in Lenox, Massachusetts. Five people total were involved in the real-life accident, four girls and one boy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wisehouse Classics
• Release date: Dec 23, 2019
• ISBN: 9789176371589

Edith Wharton

EDITH WHARTON (1862 - 1937) was a unique and prolific voice in the American literary canon. With her distinct sense of humor and knowledge of New York’s upper-class society, Wharton was best known for novels that detailed the lives of the elite including: The House of Mirth, The Custom of Country, and The Age of Innocence. She was the first woman to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and one of four women whose election to the Academy of Arts and Letters broke the barrier for the next generation of women writers.

Book preview

IX

Introduction

♣

Ihad known something of New England village life long before I made my home in the same county as my imaginary Starkfield; though, during the years spent there, certain of its aspects became much more familiar to me.

Even before that final initiation, however, I had had an uneasy sense that the New England of fiction bore little except a vague botanical and dialectical resemblance to the harsh and beautiful land as I had seen it. Even the abundant enumeration of sweet-fern, asters and mountain-laurel, and the conscientious reproduction of the vernacular, left me with the feeling that the outcropping granite had in both cases been overlooked. I give the impression merely as a personal one; it accounts for Ethan Frome, and may, to some readers, in a measure justify it.

So much for the origin of the story; there is nothing else of interest to say of it, except as concerns its construction.

"The problem before me, as I saw in the first flash, was this: I had to deal with a subject of which the dramatic climax, or rather the anti-climax, occurs a generation later than the first acts of the tragedy. This enforced lapse of time would seem to anyone persuaded as I have always been that every subject (in the novelist’s sense of the term) implicitly contains its own form and dimensions, to mark Ethan Frome as the subject for a novel. But I never thought this for a moment, for I had felt, at the same time, that the theme of my tale was not one on which many variations could be played. It must be treated as starkly and summarily as life had always presented itself to my protagonists; any attempt to elaborate and complicate their sentiments would neces-sarily have falsified the whole. They were, in truth these figures, my granite out-croppings; but half-emerged from the soil, and scarcely more articulate.

This incompatibility between subject and plan would perhaps have seemed to suggest that my situation was after all one to be rejected. Every novelist has been visited by the insinuating wraiths of false good situations siren-subjects luring his cockle-shell to the rocks; their voice is oftenest heard, and their mirage-sea beheld, as he traverses the waterless desert which awaits him half-way through whatever work is actually in hand. I knew well enough what song those sirens sang, and had often tied myself to my dull job till they were out of hearing perhaps carrying a lost masterpiece in their rainbow veils. But I had no such fear of them in the case of Ethan Frome. It was the first subject I had ever approached with full confidence in its value, for my own purpose, and a relative faith in my power to render at least a part of what I saw in it.

Every novelist, again, who intends upon his art, has lit upon such subjects, and been fascinated by the difficulty of presenting them in the fullest relief, yet without an added ornament, or a trick of drapery or lighting. This was my task, if I were to tell the story of Ethan Frome; and my scheme of construction which met with the immediate and unqualified disapproval of the few friends to whom I tentatively outlined it / still think justified in the given case. It appears to me, indeed, that, while an air of artificiality is lent to a tale of complex and sophisticated people which the novelist causes to be guessed at and interpreted by any mere looker-on, there need be no such drawback if the looker-on is sophisticated, and the people he interprets are simple. If he is capable of seeing all around them, no violence is done to probability in allowing him to exercise this faculty; it is natural enough that he should act as the sympathizing intermediary between his rudimentary characters and the more complicated minds to whom he is trying to present them. But this is all self-evident, and needs explaining only to those who have never thought of fiction as an art of composition.

The real merit of my construction seems to me to lie in a minor detail. I had to find means to bring my tragedy, in a way at once natural and picture-making to the knowledge of its narrator. I might have sat him down before a village gossip who would have poured out the whole affair to him in a breath, but in doing this I should have been false to two essential elements of my picture: first, the deep-rooted reticence and inarticulateness of the people I was trying to draw, and secondly the effect of roundness (in the plastic sense) produced by letting their case be seen through eyes as different as those of Harmon Gow and Mrs. Ned Hale. Each of my chroniclers contributes to the narrative just so much as he or she is capable of understanding of what, to them, is a complicated and mysterious case; and only the narrator of the tale has scope enough to see it all, to resolve it back into simplicity, and to put it in its rightful place among his larger categories.

I make no claim for originality in following a method of which La Grande Bretêche and The Ring and the Book had set me the magnificent example; my one merit is, perhaps, to have guessed that the proceeding there employed was also applicable to my small tale.

I have written this brief analysis the first I have ever published of any of my books because, as an author s introduction to his work, I can imagine nothing of any value to his readers except a statement as to why he decided to attempt the work in question, and why he selected one form rather than another for its embodiment. These primary aims, the only ones that can be explicitly stated, must, by the artist, be almost instinc-tively felt and acted upon before there can pass into his creation that imponderable something more which causes life to circulate in it, and preserves it for a little from decay.

EDITH WHARTON

March 31st, 1922

♣ The Introduction to the 1922 edition (Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York) by Edith Wharton.

}

Ethan Frome

IHAD THE STORY, BIT BY BIT, FROM VARIOUS PEOPLE, AND, AS GENERALLY happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.

If you know Starkfield, Massachusetts, you know the post-office. If you know the post-office you must have seen Ethan Frome drive up to it, drop the reins on his hollow-backed bay and drag himself across the brick pavement to the white colonnade: and you must have asked who he was.

It was there that, several years ago, I saw him for the first time; and the sight pulled me up sharp. Even then he was the most striking figure in Starkfield, though he was but the ruin of a man. It was not so much his great height that marked him, for the natives were easily singled out by their lank longitude from the stockier foreign breed: it was the careless powerful look he had, in spite of a lameness checking each step like the jerk of a chain. There was something bleak and unapproachable in his face, and he was so stiffened and grizzled that I took him for an old man and was surprised to hear that he was not more than fifty-two. I had this from Harmon Gow, who had driven the stage from Bettsbridge to Starkfield in pre-trolley days and knew the chronicle of all the families on his line.

He’s looked that way ever since he had his smash-up; and that’s twenty-four years ago come next February, Harmon threw out between reminiscent pauses.

The smash-up it was—I gathered from the same informant—which, besides drawing the red gash across Ethan Frome’s forehead, had so shortened and warped his right side that it cost him a visible effort to take the few steps from his buggy to the post-office window. He used to drive in from his farm every day at about noon, and as that was my own hour for fetching my mail I often passed him in the porch or stood beside him while we waited on the motions of the distributing hand behind the grating. I noticed that, though he came so punctually, he seldom received anything but a copy of the Bettsbridge Eagle, which he put without a glance into his sagging pocket. At intervals, however, the post-master would hand him an envelope addressed to Mrs. Zenobia —or Mrs. Zeena–Frome, and usually bearing conspicuously in the upper left-hand corner the address of some manufacturer of patent medicine and the name of his specific. These documents my neighbour would also pocket without a glance, as if too much used to them to wonder at their number and variety, and would then turn away with a silent nod to the post-master.

Every one in Starkfield knew him and gave him a greeting tempered to his own grave mien; but his taciturnity was respected and it was only on rare occasions that one of the older men of the place detained him for a word. When this happened he would listen quietly, his blue eyes on the speaker’s face, and answer in so low a tone that his words never reached me; then he would climb stiffly into his buggy, gather up the reins in his left hand and drive slowly away in the direction of his farm.

It was a pretty bad smash-up? I questioned Harmon, looking after Frome’s retreating figure, and thinking how gallantly his lean brown head, with its shock of light hair, must have sat on his strong shoulders before they were bent out of shape.

Wust kind, my informant assented. More’n enough to kill most men. But the Fromes are tough. Ethan’ll likely touch a hundred.

Good God! I exclaimed. At the moment Ethan Frome, after climbing to his seat, had leaned over to assure himself of the security of a wooden box—also with a druggist’s label on it—which he had placed in the back of the buggy, and I saw his face as it probably looked when he thought himself alone. That man touch a hundred? He looks as if he was dead and in hell now!

Harmon drew a slab of tobacco from his pocket, cut off a wedge and pressed it into the leather pouch of his cheek. Guess he’s been in Starkfield too many winters. Most of the smart ones get away.

Why didn’t he?

Somebody had to stay and care for the folks. There warn’t ever anybody but Ethan. Fust his father—then his mother—then his wife.

And then the smash-up?

Harmon chuckled sardonically. That’s so. He had to stay then.

"I

Reviews for Ethan Frome

[tess_w · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Hauntingly sad and beautifully written describes Root #89, Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton. This reminds me of the works of George Eliot and Thomas Hardy. It is the story of Ethan Frome and his icecube of a wife, Zeena, who is also a hypchondriac. Zeena's cousin, Mattie, comes to live in and help and of course she is verbally abused by Zeena. This abuse and neglect draw Ethan and Mattie together. Zeena notices the attraction and sends Mattie off. ""The inexorable facts closed in on him like a prison-warder handcuffing a convict. There was no way out—none. He was a prisoner for life, and now his one ray of light was to be extinguished." The story is told as a flashback, 24 years in the past and takes place in the brutal northeast of Massachusetts. This may be the best book I've read thus far in 2017!

[justjukka · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I enjoyed invasive oral surgery more than I enjoyed reading this book. All three of them, actually. The first one made me rather sick, due to the general anesthesia. At least the dentist provided anesthetics during the procedure. There was nothing dulling the pain of reading this book. It should NOT be on the required reading list for any high school.

[majesdane-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I love it; the prose is beautiful. Everyone I've ever met seems to hate this book. It's Wharton's most famous book. Make of that what you will.

[voracia · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

For more book reviews and other posts of interest to readers and writers, please visit my blog, Voracia: Goddess of Words.Ethan Frome is set in Starkfield, Massachusettes, where everything is very stark indeed. Much of the story also takes place in the winter, when the New England town is covered in snow and bitter cold. At the heart of the story is, of course, Ethan Frome: a farmer living in the early 1900's who has been dealt a bad lot in life. He had been living away from Starkfield, at college, studying to become an engineer, when his father died and he had to return home to the family farm to care for his ailing mother, Zenobia. He ends up marrying Zeena, the nurse who took care of his mother, more out of duty and gratefulness than love or passion. Before long Zeena becomes a hypochondriac, inventing illnesses and perpetually seeking possible cures for them. Into this depressing scene steps Mattie, who is quite the breath of fresh air for Ethan. A distant relative—-she was the daughter of Zenobia’s cousin-—Mattie's father had squandered all of the family’s money, a fact which was only revealed after his death. Mattie’s mother apparently dies of the shock and shame, leaving Mattie a penniless orphan. Zeena’s doctor suggests that Zeena find someone to help with the household chores, so Mattie comes to Starkfield to do just that, and also ends up winning Ethan’s heart.The story is so depressingly tragic that at times I wanted to stop reading it. But it was like watching a scary movie or sitting down on a roller-coaster: you want to stop, kind of, but you also want to keep going. The story starts out by revealing that Ethan was in a freak accident, and then goes back in time, so you know things don’t end up well. The entire feel of the book is incredibly ominous and its pace marches you right on from the sweet tale of a simple and down-on-his-luck farmer who falls in love with a young, care-free girl, to the bad ending you know is coming. The language is simple and no-nonsense, yet it alternatively scares you like Stephen King and pulls on your heart strings like Jane Austen. There’s a scene near the beginning in which Ethan has gone to pick Mattie up from a barn dance that puts you right there in the middle of their budding relationship, which is technically illicit and wrong, but feels so right that you find yourself rooting for them, even though you know it will end horribly. Ethan watches Mattie dancing, yearning for both Mattie herself and the simple innocence and hopefulness of youth, which is long-lost for him. When the dance ends, a young boy flirts with Mattie and offers her a ride home, and Ethan thinks that soon Mattie will get married and leave him. Yet, she is so surprised and happy that he is there to pick her up, and she reassures him that she’s not going anywhere. The tone of the relationship between Ethan and Mattie is light-hearted, casual and happy, in the middle of this otherwise entirely depressing book. Despite its tragic subject matter, Ethan Frome is a gem of a book I plan to re-read again and again. I also want to read more of Wharton’s work. This is the first book I’ve read by her and I know that most of the rest of her works deal with the upper class New York society from which she came. I don’t know how she can write so well about a poor New England farmer, so I can only imagine what she writes about those characters that comprise her own element. I give Ethan Frome four and a half stars and highly recommend it to anyone. For more book reviews and other posts of interest to readers and writers, please visit my blog, Voracia: Goddess of Words.

[k6gst · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Louis Auchincloss, a favorite of mine, thought very highly of Edith Wharton, and wrote a short biography. They were from the same world, though separated by a couple of generations. I found this charmer about doomed, wasted lives, forbidden passion, and deathwish tobogganing in the bleakest patch of late 19th century New England to be more fun when I read the dialogue aloud in an old-timey Yankee accent. The ending is a bang-up twist. I enjoyed it, but I’m ready to read about rich people’s problems again.

[charlie68_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Dark and shadowy and full of foreboding. Predictable near the end, but the epilogue isn't.

[cavernism · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I reread this because I read it in high school and HATED it. It is a big ball of misery - I wanted to read it again, partially because I wanted to see if knowing how depressing it is going into it would make it a better read. And it did - it's really well-written story. But also now I need something extremely cheerful to read...

[sdunford_6 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Hated this book when forced to read it in High School - was shocked to see how much better it got when I reread it as an adult.

[joririchardson · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I chose to read this as the first of Edith Wharton, due to it's small size. I loved her writing style, and plan on reading the rest of her books as well."Ethan Frome" was the romantic, sad story of a man who became caught up in a loveless marriage to a woman who is very sick. Ethan struggles between his contradictory feelings of love and guilt when he begins to develop deep feelings for their servant girl Mattie, who is also his wife's young cousin.This book is beautiful in it's simplicity and precise dialogue, never too drawn out, never including a scene or word that is not necessary and relevant to the story. An intriguing plot and the three well written main characters made me enjoy reading this book very much.Don't read this if you are in the mood for a cozy, warmly romantic story, however.A tragic, heartbreaking story of love and loss.

[ravingraven_1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I do not recommend this book. If you want to read an Edith Wharton novel, read the Age of Innocence. If you already have read the Age of Innocence and want to read Ethan Frome, read the Age of Innocence again. Ethan Frome was difficult to finish. Although considered a classic, this is a book I would not read again. Honestly, I wish I could forget Ethan Frome.

[elissajanine · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I try to have a classic book going on at all times, just there in the background, and this one was thin and quick and easy to read. Wharton's style is light and engaging, her characters interesting, and the whole story just kind of flowed out smoothly. I'm not as compelled by these characters as some of her others, but Ethan Frome's story was a good read and kept me turning the pages, even when I totally knew what was going to happen. It was well-crafted, and I enjoyed it.

[justmerosalie · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is my absolute favorite work of all time. It is so haunting. Wharton's writing skill has such an incredible ability to draw you into the setting, Cold, fultility, and loneliness cause you to feel crisp freezing nights and sense the breathtaking power in nature. Descriptions of the landscapes are incredible. Ethan falls in love with his wife's cousin who comes to help out when the wife is taken ill. The story is very realistically tragic.. It took me awhile to figure out the theme of this novel. Like the characters, I wondered what was going on and why. Wharton writes beautifully, portraying a sadness that is universal. It is Wharton at her best.

[chris_v_7 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Proof of Wharton's greatness see's her switch from the ballrooms of high society to the stark landscape of New England where Ethan Frome, the care-worn farmer with an invalid, needy wife finds a kindred spirit in young Mattie, a pretty young in-law who comes to stay.A lean, sad story beautifully told.

[mrslee_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This was a fine story to read. The words were crafted so well and the mood and setting pulled you into the tale. I loved the way the author chose to present the story and can see why it has become a classic and part of American Literature classes. I'm just glad that I didn't read the description on the back of the book before I read the story though. It ruined the climax of the tale.

[stephcan13 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The quiet, dark, cold world of longing that Wharton lulls us into in Ethan Frome is just as irresistable to me now as it was over a decade ago, when I read this short novel for the first time. The world she creates of plain, ordinary people and their plain, ordinary drama could easy fall flat in another author's hands, yet Wharton manages to execute a simple, and ultimately sad story in such an eloquent matter that these "simple" country women and men's lives take on a fascinating qualtiy to be rivaled by the wealthiest socialites and celebrities. Most impressive is her ability to use setting--a brutal northern winter--to reinforce the joy and hopelessness the main characters experience; thus setting becomes a dominant force, if not a character, unto itself. I adore this book and highly recommend it to everyone.

[benuathanasia · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

So, yeah...I can safely say I have no idea why anyone likes this. Not a damn thing of any interest happened. It's about an "affair" (though not much more beyond affectionate feelings happen). As a former high school English language arts teacher, I can easily see how "classics" like this can kill a student's potential enjoyment of literature. It was just ridiculously mediocre.

[lauralkeet · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Despite being a huge Edith Wharton fan, I put off reading this book for years. I picked it up after reading Henry James’ Daisy Miller, to see how Wharton handled a short novel about love and loss. The two novels deal with somewhat different themes, but Wharton’s treatment is far superior. Ethan Frome’s hypochondriac wife Zeena is needy and bed-ridden, and takes Ethan for granted. His days are enlivened by Mattie Silver, a destitute cousin who manages the household in exchange for room and board. Wharton paints a vivid scene of Frome’s isolated New England farmhouse in the middle of a snowy winter, with horse-drawn carriages taking people and goods to and from the town:The afternoon was drawing to an end, and here and there a lighted pane spangled the cold grey dusk and made the snow look whiter. The bitter weather had driven everyone indoors and Ethan had the long rural street to himself. Suddenly he heard the brisk play of sleigh-bells and a cutter passed him, drawn by a free-going horse.When Zeena travels overnight to see a doctor in another town, Ethan and Mattie spend their first evening alone sitting in front of the fire enjoying one another’s company. But when Zeena returns, the romantic tension between Ethan and Mattie is palpable, and not lost on Zeena. Manipulative and determined, Zeena sets events in motion that change their lives forever.I’m amazed that in just 100 pages I became so emotionally invested in the fates of Ethan, Mattie, and Zeena. This is not a happy story, but it is brilliantly written.

[ysar_6 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Tragically and simply romantic, this is one of my favorite books of all-time. Nothing terribly exciting happens...there's no big drama or action. It's just a simple story about simple people with feelings that cannot be acted upon. I can't really describe why this book drew me in. On the surface, it's depressing and bleak, but there is a depth to it that is captivating.

[djupstrom · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

BORING! I just kept waiting for something...anything to happen. I don't care if this is classic...don't read it.

[gbev2008 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Wharton is a very good writer and most of the book was pretty compelling, but all the melodrama at the end was a little hard to swallow.Well written, but certainly not the classic I was led to believe.

[kraysaulis · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I read this because so many people had told me how horribly depressing it was. True, this is not a happy story, but if you can get beyond that and look at it for literary merit it is beautiful. Every emotion is perfectly and miserably described. It is a perfect depiction of a heart-breaking situation.

[maryreinert · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I love this story which I've read over the years. As a high school student it made an impression as I saw the results of an unfulfilled life; a life of self imposed narrowness. In a strange way it taught me to take advantage of opportunities. Reading it again years later, the sadness is even more profound. How many lives have been spent in self-created misery. So often unspoken words have a greater affect on lives than those that are uttered. A great piece of writing.

[gracez-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I thought this book was... well, very well-written, and all of that good stuff. Unfortunately, I didn't read it through, I read it in about 3 sections, with a few hectic days of interruption in between.

However, I can say that my expectations were not disappointed, and that I really like the characters - they are not entirely likeable. Mattie is naive and Ethan is somewhat weak, first for marrying Zeena for all the wrong reasons and then for what happens in the rest of the book. But then, it wouldn't be any good if it was your stereotypical hero...

And the book ends very well. I was rather impressed with the epilogue-style last chapter.

[jnwelch_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Hard to believe Ethan Frome was written by the same author as Age of Innocence. This 1911 novel is set in the New England town of Starkfield. Farmer Ethan is the physically twisted survivor of a mysterious "smash-up" many years prior, and through the narration of a man who comes to know him, we find out what happened. Ethan has a difficult, hypochondriac wife, and unfulfilled dreams of becoming an engineer. Poverty dogs their life. When a young girl relative is sent to help around their house, Ethan feels romantic stirrings and reminders of what his life might have been. The "stark" story and its outcome are haunting. A compelling and sobering read.

[lkernagh · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is my first Wharton read, which was recommended by a couple of other readers here on LT as something I could easily fit into my October reading plans. One of the things I really liked about this one is Wharton's ability to paint a realistic picture of a northern winter in a small farming community where life can be a hard scrabble and everyone knows - or thinks they know - everyone else's business. Wharton has the ability to tell a story in straightforward language, almost with a meagerness of descriptive prose, as if she was writing in a manner to reflect the bleak the New England winter landscape of its setting. The book is described as being "a powerful tale with compelling characters trapped in circumstances they seem unable to escape." From a strictly character analysis perspective, I am not quite sure I wholly agree with that statement. For me, Mattie is nothing more than a vehicle - and a bit of an air-headed one at that - to drive the story forward. Ethan has his interesting aspects but I found him to be limited, and not just by his circumstances. It is really Zeena who I found to be the most compelling of these three characters and I found myself pondering over her character more than the other two. Overall, a great introduction for me to Wharton's writing style and I will be adding more of her books to my future reading list.

[adonisguilfoyle · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I decided to download this novel because a character in my favourite film refers to it as 'a horrible book' that should be taken off the curriculum; apart from that, I was only on nodding acquaintance with the title. Though depressing, Ethan Frome is not a horrible book - stark, yes, but also evocative and powerful. (My nomination for the 'Horrible Book' award goes to Moby Dick.) Opening with a pointless narrator like Wuthering Heights, Frome's Yorkshire stable mate, Ethan Frome tells the story of a miserable husband so frustrated that he drives himself and the object of his affections into a tree. Personally, I would have strapped the wife to the sleigh, but then none of the characters are perfect. Ethan is weak, Zeena manipulative, and Mattie immature. Still, I was hoping for a more satisfying ending, or at least an escape route for Ethan, but hey ho.

[santhony_35 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

For Christmas, I ordered an mp3 player (Library of Classics) that was pre-loaded with 100 works of classic literature in an audio format. Each work is in the public domain and is read by amateurs, so the quality of the presentation is hit or miss. After sampling about a dozen more well-known offerings, I was left to select those with which I was less familiar. That is how I came across Ethan Frome by Edith WhartonThis is essentially a novella that relates the sad life of Ethan Frome, a poor New England farmer who, after enduring an unhappy marriage to a sickly woman eight years his senior, falls in love with his wife’s destitute cousin, twenty year old Mattie, who has come to live with them. If you like stories with happy endings look elsewhere. A look at life on a late 19th century New England farm, coupled with the customs and mores of that society made this an entertaining “read”. The reader in this case was a poor choice, making Ethan sound like an old man when, in fact, he was 28 years old.

[smiler69 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

"I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story. If you know Starkfield, Massachusetts, you know the post-office. If you know the post-office you must have seen Ethan Frome drive up to it, drop the reins on his hollow-back bay and drag himself across the brick pavement to the white colonnade; and you must have asked who he was. It was there that, several years ago, I saw him for the first time; and the sight pulled me up sharp. Even then he was the most striking figure in Starkfield, though he was but the ruin of a man. It was not so much his great height that marked him, for the "natives" were easily singled out by their lank longitude from the stockier foreign breed: it was the careless powerful look he had, in spite of a lameness checking each step like the jerk of a chain. There was something bleak and unapproachable in his face, and he was so stiffened and grizzled that I took him for an old man and was surprised to hear that he was no more than fifty-two."The narrator goes on to tell us the story of Ethan Frome, who had great aspirations as a young man, with hopes of having a brilliant career and moving to a big city. But first with his sick parents, and then Zenobia, the woman who helped him care for them—whom he was trapped into marrying and who then went on to become a self-pitying and difficult invalid who sought expensive cures—Ethan had little hope of escaping the ancestral home and the poverty that his doomed farm and marriage constrained him to. When Zeena's cheerful first cousin Mattie comes to the farm to help with the household chores in the heart of a bitterly cold winter, Ethan can't help but bask in her warmth. He starts dreaming of a better life again, and together they share a brief and chaste romance which, in this puritanical place, is bound to spell disaster. This is great writing by Wharton, and though the story might be glum, the characters and their opposing motivations form an unforgettable love triangle in a human drama which I found almost comical for the extreme state of hopelessness into which the protagonists are plunged, seemingly for all eternity (but that's just me). The introduction by Elizabeth Ammons in the Penguin Classics Deluxe edition, which I read after taking in the novel, goes on to explain how it drew on Wharton's personal experiences, even though based on first impressions, one might think Ethan Frome was a complete departure from her writing about the cosseted upper classes she belonged to. For example, the mysterious ailments Zenobia suffers from appear to be derived directly from the author's own struggles with depression for which Wharton sought treatment in the mid-1890s: "She suffered from nausea, weight loss, extreme fatigue, headaches, and profound despondency. At the time, the standard diagnosis for such symptoms was neurasthenia, sometimes called hysteria, and the treatment, as Wharton's contemporary Charlotte Perkins Gilman chronicled in her famous 1892 story, [The Yellow Wallpaper], was known as the rest cure. The prescribe therapy involved total bed rest, preferably in a hospital, hotel, or sanitarium, where the patient was fed, bathed, given douches and enemas, massaged, and in every other way kept dependent and completely immobile for weeks or, if necessary, months. This program of rest required removal from all exciting or upsetting stimuli such as newspapers, magazines, books, letters, visitors, or any other activity requiring mental of physical exertions, no matter how mild, including writing, sewing, and drawing. The rest cure aimed to create a healing calm so that the patient could regain mental health. For Gilman, as her short story records, it was a recipe for insanity [and no wonder!]. But for Wharton, the regimen she experienced as an outpatient had a beneficial effect. In large part she recovered because he physician, unlike Gilman's, encouraged her to pursue her writing, which she avidly did." It seems that the notion of infidelity was also drawn from personal experiences. As Wharton and her husband Teddy's unhappy marriage fell apart, each struggling with depression and with Teddy having several affairs, Edith Wharton also broke her marriage vows and "had a secret and passionate love affair with a slightly younger man, Morton Fullerton, from about 1907 to 1910. As she related it [in documents she explicitly left in a sealed packed labeled, in her own hand "For My Biographer], the affair exposed her for the first and only time in her life to intense, fulfilling, erotic passion, a realitiy that respectable late-era Victorian women such as Wharton, brought up to believe sex a necessary and unspeakable evil, where not supposed to experience. The affair ended in 1910. A year later she wrote Ethan Frome and in 1913 filed for divorce."

[bookdivasreads · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Although released in 1911 this story is timeless (just as applicable in 2011 as 1911). A quick read but engrossing from the first page to the last.

[1owlette · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

One of my all-time favourite novels, this beautifully written, spare tale of wasted lives and lost dreams has stayed with me for many years. The character of Ethan, an imperfect man with longings for something larger that he can sometimes glimpse, is one of the most moving in fiction.