Because March is women's history month, I made it a point to only read women authors over the course of the month. As the month winds to a close, I have visited many places and cultures, learning about historical events from a female perspective. Yet, to observe women's history month, it would not be complete with paying homage to classic authors. In this regard, I decided to read Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton's tragic novella.

Ethan Frome of Starkfield, Massachusetts has known much tragedy in his life. First his father grew ill, leaving young Frome to move back to care for the family farm. Then his mother grew sick, and a young relation named Zenobia Silver came to live with the Fromes to care for her. Without much of a future besides the farm in his possession, Frome falls for Zenobia, and they marry. Yet, Zenobia is not a country girl, and Frome hopes to sell the farm so that he can move his wife into town.

Tragedy strikes again as now Zenobia grows ill. Frome is unable to sell the farm and is isolated in the country. Zenobia'a relations suggest that a young cousin Mattie Silver come and care for her in the manner that Zenobia had cared for Frome's mother. While Zenobia is ailing and supposedly on her deathbed, Frome starts showing feelings toward Mattie. What ensues for the rest of the novella is his conflicted feelings toward both women, as he considers his future.

Wharton paints a picture of a grim reality for Frome. That the story occurs in winter in a town named Starkfield is no coincidence. Her witticism as she debates whether Frome should honor his wife's feelings or leave her and elope with Mattie are uncanny. Even though Starkfield appears as a depressing town to life in, Wharton's use of language and plot development had me reading to discover the denouement of Frome's sad tale. The fact that she included her usual twist toward the end enhanced the story.

I have only discovered Edith Wharton over this March's women's history month reads, but I find it remarkable that her writing can go from comedy in one story to tragedy in another and still contain a high level of wit. She wrote at a time when the novel was dominated by the middle class, and was one of few upper crust society women to write. That she entered a male profession and eventually won a Pulitzer for her writing, makes her career all the more impressive. Although Ethan Frome is a tragedy, I found the story interesting enough to hold my attention, especially as Wharton inserted her mark at the end. A four star read, I look to read more of Wharton's work in the future.

For me, this novel is not Wharton’s best work, but still scores an easy 4 stars. She is that great.
Ethan Frome is a farmer married to a woman he dislikes so intensely that he blows out the candle before undressing so he doesn’t have to look at her when he gets into bed.
And Zenobia is truly horrible. She’s a manipulative, self-absorbed, black hole of negativity who suffers from vaguely described “shooting pains” that keep her from doing any real work. Partly to help Zeena out, the couple brings her cousin, Mattie Silver, to live with them and within a few months Ethan is passionately in love with her. It’s clear that Zenobia is fully aware of Ethan’s feelings, although she never says a word, and all that’s unspoken between the three of them makes the novel enormously suspenseful. Finally, Zenobia makes her move. After visiting a doctor in the next town she tells Ethan her diagnosis.

“I’ve got complications,” she said.
Ethan knew the word for one of exceptional import. Almost everybody in the neighborhood had “troubles” but only the chosen had “complications.” To have them was … in most cases a death warrant. Ethan’s heart was jerking to and fro between two extremities of feeling, but for the moment compassion prevailed. His wife looked so hard and lonely sitting there in the darkness with such thoughts …
“You must do just what [the doctor] tells you,” Ethan answered sympathetically.
She was still looking at him. “I mean to,” she said. He was struck by a new note in her voice, it was neither whining nor reproachful, but dryly resolute.
“And what does he want you should do?” he asked with a mounting vision of fresh expenses.
“He wants I should have a hired girl.”

In other words, Mattie has to leave since Zeena needs someone who can truly “do for her.” She hired a girl on the way back from the doctor’s and Mattie’s departure is to take place the next day.
It’s such a small thing—a young woman moving away from her cousin’s house—yet in Wharton’s masterful hands it takes on profound and universal importance. The rest of the novel moves forward with a horrible inevitability and even though I pretty much knew what was going to happen, I kept irrationally hoping that it would go differently for all of them. The ending reveals a really sad twist that I didn’t see coming.
Wharton often names her characters in ways that cleverly indicates their role, and this novel is no exception. The word “Fromm” means “honorable” or “pious” in German, and honor is perhaps Ethan’s most prominent quality. It’s also what's responsible for his downfall.
The first Zenobia was an ancient warrior queen who is famous for saying, “I am a queen and as long as I live I will reign.” Yup.
But for all of its strengths, I prefer The House of Mirthand The Age of Innocenceto Ethan Frome. All three books are about people who want things they can’t have because of their time and place in history, yet here, the ending relies too much on fate for my taste. The novel feels like a moral tale and that fable-ish quality, combined with a considerable dose of melodrama, robs it of some depth.
Still, there’s plenty here to enjoy.

Una historia desgarradora maravillosamente escrita.

Just when you think that it's safe to kiss someone you're not married to, just then, disaster lurks barely a sledge ride away!

Ethan Frome is remarkable, in probability wrongly, in my mind for its relentless bleakness. This is an American novella, by an American author in which there is no escape. The West is there, but the protagonist can't afford the journey. This an impoverished landscape, the modest hero ploughs an infertile furrow. An ungallant way to refer to a marriage, but there you go, in Ethan Frome marriage is duty, more burdensome than most. A best pickle dish is too precious to use and when broken is carried out with as much solemnity as a dead body, perhaps more. The consequences of sin are life long, while grace, let alone redemption, are entirely absent. Then again perhaps it is natural if in a country there is an overwhelming belief in optimism, expansion, and the possibility of forever starting again that a contrasting voice emerges that says 'yes, that may well be the American dream, but this is the American reality'.

Very oddly Ethan Frome reminds me of The Great Gatsby and those "boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past". There some surface glitter covered over an essential immobility that here is plain and unvarnished. This stands in contrast to relentless reinvention, a rootlessness that allows renewal, the kind of thing we see in Sister Carrie the woman from the back of beyond becoming a star of the New York stage.

This seems to be a dying society on the edges of buoyant country. The narrator's opening remarks talk of the natives, like Frome, and the later emigrants. Although the narrator seem to approve of the old blood, the implication of the story is that they are an evolutionary dead end. Too tied down to achieve anything new. The need to take a trip by horse drawn vehicle to the train station suggests this is a stagnating backwater, cut off from the energetic currants of the nineteenth century let alone those of the twentieth. If the present does reach into the town it is only through the patent medicines that validates Zenobia Frome's status as being perpetually sick.

This work that Lisa Simpson was so pleased to gain a copy of to call her own is like a little piece of Thomas Hardy, transplanted to New England. A corner of a foreign field that is for ever Wessex.

Wharton elige una invernal ciudad ficticia de Nueva Inglaterra para contarnos una inquietante historia llena de simbolismo y con muy pocos personajes. Un joven llega a la ciudad y observa a un misterioso hombre que despierta la atención de todo el mundo: Ethan Frome. ¿Cuál es la historia detrás de este enigmático individuo?

La autora vuelve a hacer gala de su talento a la hora de narrar, con una prosa bellísima, unos personajes perfectamente construidos y una gélida atmósfera que va creciendo y cargándose de tensión hasta estallar en la parte final.

Pese a su brevedad consigue condensar una gran variedad de temas y reflexiona sobre el amor imposible, el destino y la eterna encrucijada, siempre tan presente en los protagonistas de Wharton, de cumplir con sus deberes o seguir los dictados de su corazón.

‘Ethan Frome’ es una joya que difícilmente decepciona. Tiene fuerza y da mucho con muy poco. Recomendable leerla del tirón o en un par de sentadas para conectar mejor con su intensidad.

Plot - 12/20
Characters - 12/20
Creativity - 11/20
Writing - 18/20
Pace - 7/10
Ending - 6/10
66/100 =
D+
2/5 stars

WHAT DID I JUST READ?! I can't believe I read this for english. It felt like such a pointless story. When I finished the book I didn't even realize it (reading the ebook) trying to go on to the next page to find that, nope! It's actually the end. I found the first half to be very slow but as the story went on it picked up pace and got really crazy with all the drama coming down. A lot of things were confusing and because of that I'm going to have to go back and reread the prolong. Over all I felt like the storyline didn't do much for me, I just felt bad for Ethan and everyone else in his world. Won't necessarily recommend.

can't pass up a short classic!

the theme of this book seems to be "old-timey life is depressing," and i can't argue with that. if i had to go my whole life without knowing the concept of a hot shower or an insomnia cookies franchise, i'd be upset too.

generally this is a little saccharine, but it does a good job of presenting how impossible it can be to be happy and poor. even if it does feel like the lit equivalent of an afterschool special in doing it.

bottom line: feels like assigned reading! which i, a dork, don't hate.

When a man loves her woman

Once upon a time in New England, when people still used the horse and buggy for transportationl, there lived a kind man with his mean wife. She was seven years older than he, and so grew to look old and ugly much sooner. This did not help their marriage, nor did it help that she always thought that she had one illness after the other and so took to going to doctors and to bed but not with them for she was a moral woman, a woman of most men’s dreams.

Her husband Ethan may have been unhappily wedded, but I do not recallif he complained. Then one summer day when the birds were out singing their songs of joy, his wife’s cousin Matt, a woman, came to live with them. She was young and beautiful, and she sang like the summer birds. This gladdened Ethan so much, but like I said, I didn’t know that he needed to be gladdened, but he enjoyed getting up in the morning to share coffee with her at his wife’s breakfast table. He loved being around her, he loved her voice, and he even loved her footsteps in the hallway or on the steps leading up to her bedroom. He even dreamed of that. If he had been sad, he was now full of joy, and when he took care of his farm, he whistled happy tunes.

Then one Cold, dreary, rainy day his wife desired to send Matt away, and poor Ethan did not know what to do. Matt had been there a year, and it took him that long to get up the nerve to try to kiss her. And for those who are Waiting for the Hand of god to strike them dead, there is a moral to this story. (Note: It helps to have a moral to stories so We can build our own character.) No one should be so happy as to leave a partner who is not sell suited to them, because marriage is forever. Next classic.

Un relato corto pero intenso. Oscuro, opresivo, que se hilvana poco a poco, muy recomendable para el invierno, porque nos lleva a la nieve,la soledad, la icomunicación....vaya, toda una joya muy recomendable.

“He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of it's frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface; but there was nothing nothing unfriendly in his silence. I simply felt that he lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I had the sense that his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight, tragic as I guessed that to be, but had in it, as Harmon Gow had hinted, the profound accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters.”

Don't fall for the old myth that classics are boring. This novella of forbidden love, originally published in 1911, is filled with emotion. I didn't want to stop listening to the audio.

Wharton tells the tale of Ethan Frome, his hypochondriac wife Zeena, and Zeena's cousin Mattie Silver. The landscape of Starkfield, MA (particularly the cold, barren winters) is as much of a character as any of the people in the story.

Young Ethan is interested in science and engineering. He wants to escape the nothingness of Starkfield and move to a larger town where people are interested in ideas and education. He loves nature, but has no interest in agriculture. Unfortunately life's circumstances keep him tethered to Starkfield and the family farm. He marries Zeena, though they aren't well-suited. When Zeena's cousin Mattie comes to live with them, he sees an alternative to his bleak life. With Mattie in the house Ethan has a new lease on life -- though his interactions with her are completely chaste. This happiness is short-lived; however. Why? You'll have to read the book ;-)

I have to thank my GR friend Julie for encouraging me to read this. I was not disappointed!

4.5 Stars

*Spoilers, proceed with caution*. This very sad tale Ethan Frome is an account of the life of Zenobia Frome, ‘Zeena’. She was named after the great Roman queen who led a revolt against the empire - somewhat like Princess Leia.

Zeena had sacrificed her life to the man she loved, Ethan Frome. However, he repaid her by having a secret love affair with Zeena’s pennyless and lazy cousin, Matty, to whom Zeena had given a home. She was pretty, and knew when to flutter her eyelashes.

But poor Zeena was quite homely. They made fun of her, for she had false teeth, and looked much older than her 35 years. This was a direct result of caring for the sick and not taking care of herself. True, it made her a little queer, sort of a hypochondriac – a sad condition caused by anxiety.

When Zeena was in extreme pain, and had to go on an overnight trip to see a doctor, these two ungrateful persons could hardly wait to see her go, so they could act out their little fantasy. While playing a shameless game of ‘house’, they destroyed the one possession that Zeena valued, a lovely red pickle dish. This dish was a wedding gift, and to Zeena, it was the symbol of her love for Ethan. She cried when she found the broken pieces, while the two calloused lovers laughed about the ‘cat’ breaking it.

Now, it should be understood that Zeena had found a potential husband for Matty, a decent hardworking businessman, albeit somewhat socially awkward guy named Denis Eady. But Matty was having none of it. She was too good for him.

Thus Zeena knew the only way to save her marriage was to send Matty away. Ethan hated Zeena’s guts for this, and wanted to run away with Matty. That could not happen. They had no money.

On the way to the train station, they decided to have one last little fling - sledding! There was a famous sledding hill nearby, conveniently with a large elm tree at the bottom. Their first run down the hill was so much fun that Matty knew she could not live without Ethan. She slyly suggested to him that they commit suicide together, by crashing into the tree. At first he thought she had gone completely nuts, but then he remembered Zeena`s false teeth and, yeah, realized it was for the best. It is no surprise that this plan went very wrong. They both ended up crippled, and Zeena, a woman of character and principle, took care of them both for the rest of their lives.

3.5 Se trata de una novela corta, situada en el pequeño pueblo de Starkfield, en el estado de Massachussetts. Y nos adentra en la vida Ethan Frome, un hombre serio, maltratado por la vida, y sin embargo, respetado por los vecinos del pueblo.

La historia empieza explicándonos que nuestro protagonista sufrió en el pasado un terrible accidente, que le dejó grandes secuelas. Pero, que le pasó? Quien es Ethan Frome?.....para saberlo, recomiendo leer este libro. Es tan corto, y engancha de tal manera, que si digo algo más, estropeo la lectura.

Me ha gustado especialmente cómo están definidos los personajes, todos con personalidades muy marcadas. Y el paisaje, con la nieve, sus noches estrelladas y el frio, me ha parecido un personaje más del libro.

Una lectura sencilla, pero que te llega al corazón