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Ethan Frome
Ethan Frome
Ethan Frome
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Ethan Frome

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‘He looked at her hair and longed to touch it again, and to tell her that it smelt of the woods; but he had never learned to say such things…’

One harsh winter in 1900s New England, Ethan Frome toils at his farm while struggling to maintain a bearable existence with his forbidding wife, Zeena. When Ethan takes Zeena’s cousin, Mattie, home from a dance he is entranced: Mattie brings with her the possibility for happiness, and with that she quickly becomes a symbol of hope for Ethan.

First published in 1911, Ethan Frome is an intimate look at choices not made and lives not yet lived. Told through the eyes of a city outsider, this heartbreaking portrait of three lives haunted by thwarted dreams remains for many the most subtle and moving of Wharton’s works.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateJan 15, 2015
ISBN9780008110550
Author

Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton (1862–1937) was an American novelist—the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Age of Innocence in 1921—as well as a short story writer, playwright, designer, reporter, and poet. Her other works include Ethan Frome, The House of Mirth, and Roman Fever and Other Stories. Born into one of New York’s elite families, she drew upon her knowledge of upper-class aristocracy to realistically portray the lives and morals of the Gilded Age.

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Reviews for Ethan Frome

Rating: 3.6339013389252948 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

2,289 ratings108 reviews

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Dark and shadowy and full of foreboding. Predictable near the end, but the epilogue isn't.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    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.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    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...
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    It's Tiny Book Tuesday! This gem is part of the 1001 books to read before you die list. I absolutely loved this book from beginning to end. It's about a married couple whose wife's cousin comes to live with them. The husband falls madly in love with the cousin but keeps it secret from everyone. I did not see the ending coming and was shocked! Very sad indeed.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton; (5*); VMC; the Classics; New England; (dark); VIRAGO MONTHLY AUTHOR READ; (1911)One of Wharton's very best, if not her best! The story is about the seamier side of life and what can happen in a cold clime when one makes a snap decision. Sometimes one ends up paying for that second in time for the remainder of their lives. This is a wonderful, but dark, Wharton novel. Very intense and very good. Highly recommended.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    So sad, though it can be so hopeful. Excellent study of hu;man nature in such a short book.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A great novel about forbidden love, regret, back luck, and despair. Not as depressing as it sounds though. A must read for anyone who lives in New England.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Ethan Frome is a story with a tragic ending. It expresses the power of love and how far one will go for love. Even though Ethan is married, his love for Mattie Silver causes the two to partake in an unthinkable act. Edith Wharton uses this theme, illicit love to present "a drama of irresistible necessity." The emotion of Mattie and Ethan was very evident and could be felt by the reader. It's hard to believe that anything so classic could be such a page turner. This novel is recommended for anyone who wants to read a short, simple love story.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Most excellent!...her style is unmatched...my second favorite of the three of her books I have read so far....Age of Innocence is No. 1
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Bottom line: "Ethan Frome" (EF) is a kick-ass great book. My son (a Wharton fan) suggested it as an introduction to Wharton's writing, but cautioned that it was a glum tale. Even reading the book while living alone in chilly northern Japan last winter, I felt mesmerized by the quality of Wharton's writing and her sympathetic tone. The story was very compelling, the main characters all seemed plausible and worthy of sympathy, and the agony of unrequited passion between Ethan and Mattie felt palpable. Maybe I am naive...but, for me, the ending was a great surprise. It pleased and saddened me. Finally, the author's masterful and confident prose floored me as well. Not to sound like a pedantic twit, but Wharton's use of semicolon constructions struck me as unusually impactful and exemplary.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Digital audio narrated by C M Hebert From the book jacket: Ethan Frome works his unproductive farm and struggles to maintain a bearable existence with his difficult, suspicious, and hypochondriac wife, Zeena. But when Zeena’s vivacious cousin enters their household as a hired girl, Ethan finds himself obsessed with her and with the possibilities for happiness she comes to represent.My reactions:I love Edith Wharton’s writing. I love the way she explores relationships and unfulfilled desires. The tension is palpable, the yearning almost unendurable. She’s a little heavy-handed with the allegory / metaphor in this case. The setting is Starkfield, Massachusetts, in winter; as if the reader needs a reminder of how depressing and lacking in color Ethan’s life is. Though I was reading in the midst of a summer heat wave, I felt chilled. And then I felt that spark of attraction between Ethan and Mattie. Felt Ethan’s heart soar with the possibilities, only to sink with the realization that he was trapped in a device of his own making. C M Hebert does a fine job narrating the audio book. He reads at a fine pace, and his tone is suitable to the material. After listening, however, I also picked up the text and read through several passages. I think I prefer the text so that I can savor Wharton’s writing.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    "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."
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    My favorite of Edith Wharton's novels are those set in the center of the New York Society of the "Gilded Age". By contrast Ethan Frome is set in the fictional New England town of Starkfield, where an unnamed narrator tells the story of his encounter with Ethan Frome, a man with dreams and desires that end in an ironic turn of events. The narrator tells the story based on an account from observations at Frome's house when he had to stay there during a winter storm.The novel is framed by an extended flashback. The first chapter opens with an unnamed narrator spending a winter in Starkfield. He attempts to learn about the life of a mysterious local figure named Ethan Frome, a man who had been injured in a horrific “smash-up” twenty-four years before. Frome is described as “the most striking figure in Starkfield”, “the ruin of a man” with a “careless powerful look…in spite of a lameness checking each step like the jerk of a chain”. Throughout the novel Ethan Frome makes ample use of symbolism as a literary device. Reminiscent of The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (also set in New England), Edith Wharton uses the color red against the snowy white background of her Massachusetts setting to symbolize Ethan's cousin Mattie’s attraction and vitality as opposed to his wife Zeena, as well as her temptation to Ethan in general. Wharton uses the cat and the pickle dish to symbolize the failing marriage of Ethan and Zeena; the cat symbolizes Zeena’s presence when Ethan and Mattie are alone, and when it breaks the pickle dish, this symbolizes the final fracturing of the marriage that is rapidly coming as Mattie and Ethan slide closer and closer to adultery.The story is tragic and very dark in character. Yet Wharton's prose style makes it worth every moment spent reading about Ethan Frome.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I don't think I'll be forgetting this book anytime soon- or ever.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Ethan Frome by Edith WhartonBlackstone Audio, narrated by C.M. HebertI think this may have been Wharton's warning to her readers to avoid making a hasty decision on whom you will marry. Avoid the shrews! Ethan Frome was the most handsome man in his little town of Starkfield, Massachusetts. He was a quiet man with dreams of becoming an engineer. He thought running his father's farm would be temporary, but he was devoted to caring for his ailing parents before they died. He received help one winter from a woman named Zeena; and once both parents were gone, Ethan realized he had gotten used to her and asked her to stay. They married and shortly after, she started evidencing what surely must have been hypochondria (and general laziness). Her days were spent lying in bed with her false teeth in a glass, complaining about her symptoms, and working Ethan to the bone to provide for her. When Ethan was 28 and Zeena 35, they took in Zeena's cousin, Mattie Silver. She was to help with the household chores and whatever else Zeena desired. She was there for about a year when Ethan started becoming quietly fascinated by her happiness and vibrancy--such a polar opposite from his wife and his life in general. Zeena notices, and we witness what transpires from her jealousy, manipulation, and mean-spiritedness. Ethan has been given one difficulty after another in his life and takes it on the chin. You can't help but wish for him to be pulled from his life's downward spiral and have his brief moments of hope for a different life to be fulfilled.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Ethan Frome is a classic. I don't remember ever reading it though I saw the movie with Liam Neeson and Patricia Arquette a long time ago. Both of my sons love this book and talk about it frequently. The younger one mentioned it recently, and I decided to give it a read. Ethan Frome is married to Zeena, a hypochondriac. They're very poor but have taken in Zeena's cousin Mattie Silver to help Zeena around the house. Mattie is everything Zeena isn't; she's young and a breath of fresh air in Ethan's life.This book is deservedly a classic. The pacing of the plot is excellent with the beginning and end told by a third-party narrator and the main story told as it happened. The setting is western Massachusetts in the small fictional town of Starkfield, and the author captures the scenery and time period well. The dialogue fits, and the ending is a surprise. I'm glad they encouraged me to read this book. It truly is a must-read.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Substance: What was audacious and ground-breaking in 1911 is just old-fashioned and obvious today.The plot was clear as crystal from the end of chapter one (yes, she even writes that clichéd line, among others); however, the arc of the story is well-crafted, and the seeds of the final tragedy are fairly planted.Unfortunately, Ethan is boring, and Mattie is too too precious; the most interesting character is Zeena, who hints at submerged suspicions that Wharton never really develops, and who would have made a satisfying psychological study if she had been treated as something more than just an obstacle to Ethan's happiness.In addition, I don't think Wharton really motivates his change from dutiful responsible-ness to reckless irresponsibility between one chapter and the next (the motivations are accessible, just not explained).Style:Wharton overuses suggestive punctuation, and the narrative is full of annoying and intrusive slang-quotes - almost every paragraph had one or more words marked out, and all of them are now part of our everyday language, but the sole idiomatic word I didn't know had none.As for historical "color" and regional description, there is more and better writing in Laura Ingalls Wilder's books.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    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.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    While not set in her usual milieu of the New York upper class, Ethan Frome is a familiar Wharton story of love frustrated by the strictures of society. Farmer Ethan Frome falls for his wife's cousin who lives with them in rural New England. Mattie is young and fresh and lovely; his wife Zeena is constantly ill and demanding; Ethan is lonely, unloved and unappreciated. In this novella we join their story as this situation reaches it's sad conclusion.I think the novella format didn't really work for me. I needed to follow the development of Ethan and Mattie's relationship over a longer period to buy into the idea of them throwing away everything on what felt to me like a whim. I guess I'm just not a romantic!
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    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.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    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.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Not sure why this is considered one of her weaker works. I've read a couple others and this seemed to be the same-o story of failed love.Although a novella, it plodded like an old arthritic sorrel, through the hoary, biting ghostly whisps of evening snow, on an inky country road...
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A classic tragedy - a man who pays too dearly for his impulses and who has the best of himself stamped out by the unkindness of those who should have loved him best.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A melancholy read, with such descriptive writing that the snow on the stark fields of Starkfield glistens as you read, and the countenance of the various characters as they speak, convey their words straight to your mind's eye. The story a tragedy; the writing brilliant.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Deceptively short, deceptively simple. Don't miss this fantastic novella, that shows how one bad decision can affect a lifetime. "Marry in haste, repent at leisure" is best personified in this book.It's a perfect cold weather read, and take your time to enjoy the characters. Ethan Frome is a strong man, and despite his disability, you see strength. But as you read more you see that a tremendous weakness on his part, far in the past, affected his entire life.Don't give up on this, because the story has one of the greatest twists in modern English literature. Don't assume too much as you read, as you will be wrong. I made both my sons read this...I think any young man should.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    It's hard to review such a book as this without giving away its ending, and its secrets. It should be enough to say that this is one of the most movingly sad, tragic little books I have ever had the pleasure to come across, and as depressed as I became by the end I'm still exceptionally glad to have read it.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A farmer in turn-of-the-century New England struggles to survive and to make his farm successful. First he is tethered to the land by his helpless parents; then by his ailing wife. When Ethan's wife's alluring cousin comes to stay, she and Ethan become trapped in a hopelessly passionate love affair. Trapped by fear of public condemnation and the bonds of a loveless marriage, Ethan starts down a path which could eventually lead to tragedy for all involved.I had originally wanted to read this book after seeing the movie with Liam Neeson. Mareena and I caught the last part of the movie and were shocked at how sad it was. I love a sad book and Mareena loves the classics. I give this book an A+!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    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.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A short but powerful story. Wharton is a master of soft-footed suspense. Her tales are delicate, and her language is gentile, so it is always a gut-wrenching surprise at the end when a powerful, life-suspending event occurs. I don't read Wharton to feel happy, but I do read her to feel elevated and immersed in my senses as her stories unfold. This particular story has three strong but broken characters. Told in flashback after learning early that some tragic, body-mangling event has occurred in the past, I was compelled to keep reading because I so wanted these characters to have some moments of wholeness and grace. Those moments exist, but through a glass dimly. I can only hope that some easing of heavy burdens happens for Ethan and his two women in some unwritten future.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    “They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods.” An engineer finds himself spending the winter in the small New England town of Starkfield. The narrator becomes intrigued by a mysterious and isolated local farmer Ethan Frome who scrapes out a meagre living whilst tending to his demanding wife Zeena. He sets out to learn about Frome's life and the tragic accident that Ethan had some twenty years earlier. The narrator questions the locals but during a violent snowstorm he is forced into an overnight stay at the Frome homestead. He finally comes to learn the details of Ethan’s “smash-up”.Ethan Frome is a tale of missed opportunities and of characters trapped in circumstances they seem unable to escape. Moral and social constraints on individual desire is perhaps the book's most prominent theme. Again and again, Wharton displays the hold that social convention has on Ethan. Caring for the sick and the lame become to define Ethan’s life. Firstly years before the novel begins he tends to his ailing mother and when she dies he has to care for his hypochondriac wife. Much of the imagery in the book is built around cold, ice and snow thus the author is able to emphasize that the harsh New England's winters can have a psychologically stifling force. Most readers will no doubt agree that whilst we initially find beauty in the drifts, flakes, and icicles, but after a prolonged period of time these same wintry scenes often become oppressive. So the weather becomes more and more bleak in tune with the tone of this tale.This is only a novella and as such quite a quick read but is nonetheless a powerful tale filled with rich, at times unsettling, vocabulary. Well worth the read IMHO.

Book preview

Ethan Frome - Edith Wharton

ETHAN FROME

Edith Wharton

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William Collins

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This eBook published by William Collins in 2015

Life & Times section © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

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Classic Literature: Words and Phrases adapted from

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Life & Times

Wharton and Class

Many novelists use their prose as a means of expressing their frustrations with the contradictions and hypocrisies of human behaviour, often because they themselves do not adhere particularly stringently to the rules of etiquette that exist in their society. Of course 19th century societies in Britain and the USA were prone to formalizing polite society as a way of distinguishing the haves from the have-nots. Edith Wharton was born into a privileged American family, but she was equipped with the sensibilities to notice the contrasting absurdity with which many of her class went about their lives in public and in private. Like many other novelists before her, Wharton saw that people were people wherever they happened to fit in the hierarchy of society. They were equally capable of honourable and dishonourable behaviour; it is just that the upper class tended to cover up the latter and exaggerate the former for the sake of keeping up appearances. Wharton was not vitriolic though, for her writing is imbued with humour even though it criticises between the lines. The Age of Innocence is essentially a story about vanity, pride, judgement, temptation and prejudice in the well-to-do cohort of late 19th century US society. Underpinning the tale is the double-standard.

The Age of Innocence

The Age of Innocence is fundamentally about a gentleman who is engaged to be married, but allows his affections to stray toward another woman who is separated from her husband and about to divorce. In today’s occidental society the plot would barely raise an eyebrow, but in its period it would have been viewed as an absolute scandal. Wharton published the book in 1920, some 40-odd years after the time in which the story is set, but she was 58 years old and very familiar with the subject matter as she had been born and raised in the environment she describes. Even in the first quarter of the 20th century divorce was considered something of a taboo, so the book caused quite a stir. Wharton had, herself, been in a loveless marriage for almost three decades and had experienced a nervous breakdown following her divorce in 1913, so writing The Age of Innocence must have been therapeutic as well as a vessel through which Wharton could show the world her views. The basic premise of her story was that if you belong to a society that will trap you in marriage, you better be very sure that you are marrying the right person.

In society today, the finger of judgement is no longer pointed at those who do not succeed in marriage. As a consequence, many contemporary readers have an interest in Wharton’s genre. While they see that an overly formalized society can make marriage oppressive and generate double-standards, they also see that a lack of formality leads to a society where marriage is entirely devalued.

Wharton’s masterpiece is about as personal as one can get as a writer. The central character, Newland, still goes ahead with his marriage despite his obsessive feelings for the other woman, Countess Ellen. His wife, May, is consequently destined for a life of betrothal with unrequited love. So too is he of course, such is his sense of honour in being seen to do the right thing in the eyes of the society he belongs to. Following the marriage Newland cannot desist from courting Ellen and is on the verge of leaving his wife when he discovers that May is pregnant.

Ellen emigrates to Europe and Newland remains in America to feign happiness with May for the sake of their unborn child. A full quarter of a century later, Newland travels to Europe with his son, following May’s death. He has an opportunity to meet Ellen again, but realizes that he can never restore the past, so he walks away.

From Wharton’s point of view, all three characters are tragic in their own way. May lives through a marriage without real passion; Newland is tormented and then disappointed; Ellen is exiled by her family and never reunited with Newland even though the opportunity arises. It isn’t clear where Wharton places herself necessarily. Perhaps there is something of her in all three personalities, perhaps not, but the overall theme certainly echoes her own situation. Critics were so impressed by the book that Wharton was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1921.

The title of the novel is supposed to be satirical, a comment from Wharton on the way polite society wished to be viewed. Wharton had, in 1905, published a forerunner to The Age of Innocence in the form of The House of Mirth. The earlier book, as its title suggests, had been far more vitriolic and mocking in its condemnations and Wharton had apparently wished to redress and make amends with the later book. By the time The Age of Innocence was published the world had witnessed the Great War (World War I) and people’s attitudes had altered. Equality and egalitarianism were taking over from elitism and etiquette. In addition, in 1919 congress bowed to the pressures of suffrage and gave US women the vote. All in all, the USA had changed markedly in the 15 years between Wharton’s two novels and it was now ready to recognize and celebrate the importance of her work.

In some respects Wharton’s theme belongs to the same stable as those addressed by Jane Austen a century earlier in England. Austen’s stories, like Wharton’s, work within a behavioural framework of etiquette which is no longer relevant. Nevertheless, the drama, romance and tragedy is consequently heightened as a result of the limiting strict societal rules.

Ethan Frome

In 1911, the year that Wharton moved to Europe after the breakdown of her marriage, her novel Ethan Frome was published. A tragic love story, it has at its centre various idiosyncrasies of human behaviour that have significant consequences for the characters in the story.

Set in New England, the eponymous Ethan Frome falls in love with his ill wife’s cousin, Mattie, whom they have employed as a carer. Yet the relationship is doomed, and tragedy ensues. The plot is intricately linked to the polite society in which they live; there are strict rules of behaviour that cannot be broken, and it is an adherence to these that informs the lovers’ actions. Ethan Frome, similarly to the work of other novelists, uses the constraints of social etiquette as a tool for manipulating both characters and plotlines.

Imposing unwritten rules of behaviour on the characters’ sense of morality allows the author to invent emotive situations to engage their readers. The turmoil of Ethan’s mind, full of infidelity, is only worth writing about in a world where such thoughts are deemed unacceptable by the society in which he lives.

Wharton lived in era that was characterized by a seismic shift in societal norms and attitudes, in part due to the turn of the century and the advent of world conflict that it brought. The new world that emerged began slowly to feel more egalitarian, so socially divisive and restrictive rules of etiquette were increasingly disregarded.

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

History of Collins

Life & Times

Author’s Note

Ethan Frome

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Classic Literature: Words and Phrases

About the Publisher

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I had known something of New England village life long before I made my home in the same country 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 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 of 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 necessarily have falsified the whole. They were, in truth, these figures, my granite outcroppings; 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 tired 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 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 the 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 had tentatively outlined it – I 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 onlooker, 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 sympathising 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 effort of ‘roundness’ (in the plastic sense) produced by letting their case be seen through eyes as different as those of Harmon Gow and

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