But Mrs. Hale had said, "You've had an awful mean time, Ethan Frome," and he felt less alone with his misery.

This is the book with marvelous writing that sets you in a different atmosphere and melancholic emotional state. It is a story about longing, isolation, sorrow, complexity of life, written in long descriptive prose that is surely my favored kind of writing style.
A great piece of literature that expands beyond the ethics and morals and shows life is a much more perplexing than a black and white picture. Perfect for people that consider adultery unjustifiable and inexcusable and can’t find empathy for infidelity.
What Wharton brilliantly does is description of cruel unexchangeable circumstances of destiny that make a person quietly despair. Ethan From is a character of desperation, someone who has become stiff, cold, almost internally dead in an environment of a poor farm in neverending winter. The language of landscape is outstanding, and I love that, as in Wuthering Heights, the landscape and weather reflect the internal state of characters. The cold, always snowy and gloomy environment is interconnected with melancholy, emotional coldness of marriage without love or passion and lives stuck as they have been frozen in ice.

He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of its frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface; but there was 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.

Ethan is an odd character. At the same time, I’ve sympathized with him immensely, but he was a little distant and I couldn't connect with him completely, and there is almost a wall between him and the reader. Ethan is also an example of a grown man fixed in the mother-complex. His freedom was constrained in his early life with taking care of sick mother, and later on, he exchanges the sick mother for always-in-bed, hypochondriac, neurotic wife. His wife Zeena has total control over him, and much of that authority over him is due to her always being in the bad physical state.  Adler described the way patients can use physical or psychological symptoms in order to attain power, which is exactly how Zeena establishes her dominance. Their marriage is a relationship without connection, companionship, emotion, or comfort on any level. What Ethan thought will alleviate his solitariness in Starkfield, becomes the main source of isolation as a relationship without partnership can bring up more loneliness than solitude. But even in a marriage of that quality, without any form of true communication, Ethan is codependent and can’t make autonomous decisions.
Ethan’s life is a perpetual loop of things that he doesn’t like but has nor strength nor possibilities to change. In that state on his farm comes young Mattie, and she is the alteration that brings long-forgotten spark in his life. Wharton excels in describing the true nature of erotic, not sexual obsession. The sexual desire strives to relieve tension, but the erotic longing is in a whole completely different realm. Erotic has transformative power over a person’s life, it can make dead feel alive again, the unauthentic qualities become vibrant and true, it transforms dullness into a fiery passion and a priorly meaningless life into a life worth living. The object of erotic desire, Mattie, reminds Ethan of all of the parts of himself that were lost or neglected in his dismal everydayness. In contrast to sexual infatuation that longs for other person body, erotic fantasy is not just a relationship with other persons, it’s a fantasy about transformed, different kind of life, and another version of oneself, a dream about a life of fulfillment, intimacy, joy, freedom, warmth and happiness.

The commonplace nature of what they said produced in Ethan an illusion of long-established intimacy which no outburst of emotion could have given, and he set his imagination adrift on the fiction that they had always spent their evenings thus and would always go on doing so…

Maybe the book is a little bit didactic in displaying dreadful consequences of overindulging in the erotic fascination, showing how the great promises of erotic can end up in ruin. The storyline makes his book a highly relatable tragedy. Maybe not every single person indulged in the erotic obsession, but every person was susceptible to the false promise of absolute fulfillment in external objects. whatever it may be. Ethan can make us feel less alone in sometimes desolate experience of life that can be cold and melancholic as winters in Starkfield.

For over a decade, I’ve wanted to read Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome in the winter. I’m one of those folks who likes to time reading a book with the season in which the book is set.

This year, I finally got around to it. I think what had prevented me from finishing the book before was the narrative device Wharton uses. You know the one: the narrator comes upon a scene, spots the central character, and then somehow gets enough information to tell the main tale. (See also: Wuthering Heights.)

The thing is: this technique can seem fussy, distracting and gimmicky. But after I’d finished the short novel I went back and reread the opening chapters, and it’s an interesting device. I still don’t think it’s necessary, but it’s not as awkward as I at first thought.

But back to the book. It’s about a poor farmer who’s stuck in a dead marriage with his sickly wife, Zeena. Zeena’s pretty cousin, Mattie, is living with them to help with the chores, but she’s not a very good housekeeper and Zeena doesn’t like her. To complicate matters, Ethan has fallen in love with Mattie, and we think she has similar feelings.

We’re told early on about the winter “smash up” that gave Ethan his limp, and there’s a rich description of a great big (symbolic) tree early on… and so we know an accident will probably figure into the tale.

What’s remarkable isn’t the simple story, but the evocative language and the generous empathy Wharton has for her characters. The author is best known, of course, for being a sharp observer of upper-class New York society in books like The Age Of Innocence and The House Of Mirth. What does she know about simple country folk?

There’s not an ounce of sentimentality about her portrait, and even though the working class characters’ speech is plain and colloquial, you don’t get the feeling that Wharton judges them. If anything, she pities them. This is a sad story.

And the descriptions of the wintry landscape? Absolutely stunning. If, like me, you’ve wanted to read this, here’s my advice. Get a nice warm blanket. Put on a pot of tea or coffee. And cuddle up with the book. You won’t regret it.

L’INVERNO DEL CUORE


Liam Neeson è Ethan Frome nel film del 1993 diretto da John Madden.

Non era tanto la sua statura, perché quasi tutti gli “indigeni” spiccavano a prima vista tra le razze forestiere più tozze proprio per la loro altezza dinoccolata; era piuttosto quel suo aspetto naturalmente vigoroso, nonostante fosse talmente zoppo che, a ogni passo, sembrava che una catena legata ai piedi lo trattenesse di colpo… Aveva nel volto qualcosa di desolato e di chiuso e appariva così rigido e bianco che lo avevo preso per un vecchio, al punto che, quando mi dissero che non aveva più di cinquantadue anni, rimasi stupito.

Ecco la perfetta descrizione di quello che è stato il suo interprete più convincente, seppure in un film non molto convincente, nonostante il cast. Mi riferisco a Liam Neeson, che mi pare un match ideale.


Joan Allen è la moglie Zeena.

La Wharton si allontana decisamente dall’ambiente che gli è più familiare, quello dell’establishment (parvenu o meno), al quale lei stessa apparteneva. E si allontana dal milieu urbano che di più non si potrebbe: New England, Massachusetts, un paesino immaginario, Starkfield, montagna neve ghiaccio freddo, gente che vive e parla in accordo col luogo, e cioè poche parole, gesti e sentimenti essenziali, duri, perfino aspri.
C’è un narratore senza nome che si deve trattenere a Starkfield per affari: un giorno nota la figura alta e zoppicante di Ethan Frome e chiede in giro chi sia. Ascolta le risposte, ma non ottiene molti racconti dalla gente del villaggio, che, come già detto, sono parchi di parole, gesti, e sentimenti.
Il narratore assume Ethan come guidatore del suo calesse, e così ha modo di saperne di più.
Fine del prologo.
Da qui, siamo di colpo proiettati un quarto di secolo indietro, il racconto da prima persona cambia in terza, e noi lettori diventiamo spettatori della storia di Frome.


Patricia Arquette è Mattie. Qui, Ethan e Mattie sono già innamorati, vorrebbero fuggire insieme, se solo avessero il denaro sufficiente. Lo slittino che Ethan trasporta è elemento essenziale di questo punto del racconto.

Ethan era via da Starkfield per studiare all’università (come dice un paesano al narratore, I migliori se ne vanno). Ma Frome deve ritornare di corsa a casa perché il padre rimane ferito in un incidente di lavoro.
Da quel momento, non si allontana più da Starkfield. Da quel momento vive un quotidiano immutabile, in qualche modo lugubre: sposa Zeena (diminutivo di Zenobia) che si è presa cura dei genitori vecchi e malati di Ethan. Zeena ha anni 35 anni, lui invece 28 – lui è giovane e vigoroso, lei sembra già una vecchia.
Un matrimonio di compensazione, senza amore, nella reciproca rassegnazione, destinati insieme a una vita che ti lega senza corde e ti uccide senza veleni.
Zeena è un’ipocondriaca che lamenta stanchezza e salute cagionevole. Perciò chiama una sua lontana parente, Mattie, ad aiutarla in casa e accudirla.
Mattie è giovane e non ancora piallata da Starkfield.
Tra lei e Ethan man mano si accende una fiammella che va crescendo. Fino a che…


Zeena non è per niente contenta della felicità della nuova coppia, guai in vista.

C’è un forte senso di fato in questo breve romanzo, che è una piccola gemma.
Il fato è sempre primitivo, ancestrale, tanto più in un ambiente rurale ed essenziale come Starkfield.
Parola, il fato, che si tira dietro, invariabilmente, un senso di tragedia greca.
Il fato non può essere benigno, non può compensare, redimere, soddisfare. Il fato punisce.
Punisce anche gli innocenti. Ma tanto, nessuno è innocente.
In questo caso è un fato provvisto di beffarda, direi anche perversa, ironia, che ribalta i ruoli tra i tre personaggi.


Ethan e Mattie due cuori innamorati nel luogo e nella stagione sbagliata.

"Hey Mrs. Kinetta, are you still inflicting all that horrible Ethan Frome damage on your students?" - John Cusack, Grosse Pointe Blank

If you're looking for a book with an ever-increasing level of misery, this one is hard to beat. Try this test the next time you're with a group of your friends: just mention "Ethan Frome" out loud, and see how many of them groan audibly.

Like Wurthering Heights, this is an unintentional cautionary tale about the downside of getting romantically involved with a close relation. Just stay-off your first cousins, your unacknowledged half-brothers (or your acknowledged half-brothers for that matter), or your wife’s cousins (it counts cause it’s messy…like sled accident messy).

I didn’t find this tale romantic or sexy or #romancegoals. However, some people find Heathcliff romantic or sexy when clearly he’s a horror show who is neither. I mean, lord, I’ve heard people say that Beth Dutton and her sociopathic husband are #relationshipgoals, and well, it just confirms that therapy needs to be more affordable, accessible, and widely available. It’s like reading King Lear and saying: “That Goneril and Edmund—aspirations!”

The writing is solid, so I’m giving it three stars. Wharton can write. I just had little empathy for Ethan, or for anyone else, for that matter. All Ethan had to do, cause it was the turn of the century and men had the final word (or you had the fist), was to say ‘no’ to his wife or his cousin-mistress (or mistress-cousin or cous-miss).

Also, question: what is with these kind of books glutting up the required reading list for high school kids? Like, high school is a gauntlet of anxiety, hormones and bad relationship choices already. Why expose them to so many doomed, “romantic” ships that include suicide? Like it’s time to revise, here. Plenty of great writing out there that doesn’t include relationships with relatives (that end in bizarre suicide pacts).

It is a plaintive story of a poor farmer, Ethan Frome, a man with thwarted desires and meagre resources. His entire life (past, present and future) is allegorical of hardship, austerity and distress!

I was expecting it to be focused around passion (as from the blurbs), but I found it to be everything else but passion. Maybe had I read it a few years ago, then I might have exultantly and emotionally rated it high, but a mindset smacked with experiences, derives loopholes, and studies books with a different lens!

The synopsis -
A poor farmer (Ethan Frome) of meagre resources,
Of bleak and stiffened appearance,
Frozen by his tragic past,
Imprisoned in a forever mortal silence,
Having accumulated the cold,
of many Starkfield winters!
Living in a mute melancholy,
Having lost his parents,
Expecting a brief reprieve post marriage with Zeena,
But both fall into a forever ghastly silence,
No love, no communication,
Just doctoring his sickly wife!
The birds start twittering, and love is foretold,
When pretty, sensitive, natural beauty, Zeena’s cousin, Mattie, joins the family,
To help her!
Ethan starts falling for Mattie!
Zeena forces upon a smothering silence on her too!
A day comes by, when the 2 are alone,
Savoring every moment.
Zeena returns back home, with a medical report full of complications,
The wife confronts the two,
Catching them red-handed,
basking in a pleasure perverse!
Ethan’s sense of responsibility to his wife,
outweighs his love for Mattie,
So drives Mattie to the station, to bid her adieu.
A change of heart occurs,
When the 2 take a detour,
both reminisce about the fleeting moments of happiness shared,
Desperate, both plan a final sled ride down the hill(sledding),
Just to join each other forever in death!
But a horrendous turn impends,
Their plan is impeded, and
Both are left brutally injured,
Zeena, changes her mind/outlook post the accident,
Accepts Mattie in the household,
Story fast-forwards 20 years,
With the two slovenly women,
Huddled together in cold,
In a poorly furnished room!

My views stand tangentially opposite to what it is supposed to be construed!

For me Ethan Frome suffuses silence, isolation, self-flagellation, living in a hard-rule-bound society, and finally irrationality! But definitely, I couldn’t find a tinge of real passion/love, as it professes!

Throughout there is a silence – emotional, mental, physical



There is an eternal silence in Ethan’s life, Zeena too resorts to horrendous silence post her marriage, there is an evident lack of communication between the husband and wife.

Finally, when Mattie joins in the household, silence is enforced on her by Zeena, and finally Ethan and Mattie, both abandon rationality as they decide to commit suicide, just to enter a forever hell of silence.
For me they were already living a silent hell, suicide wasn’t a solution!
Ethan Frome is emblematic of silence & isolation, post losing parents, getting married, adoring Mattie and yet not getting her!

The imprisonment and enslavement to society rules hold the centre stage in the novel! Ethan doesn't leave his wife because he feels bound by his marriage avowals. He dreams about being married to Mattie; he writes his goodbye letter to Zeena, but subsequently his conscience does not allow him to execute his wishes. Instead, the rules of society govern his life and stays ensnared in a loveless marriage!

If I have to define the 3 characters my way, I would say-

n  
Ethan Fromen - Epitome of self-flagellation
n  
Mattien- metaphor for the ephemeral joys of life, transience of life and joy!
n  
Zeenan- the sickly kind-hearted wife, who accepts Mattie back, post the accident, irrespective of their affair!

It is defined as a tale of adulterous passion, but honestly, I found it to be a tale of poignancy, silence and isolation. Where an isolated being, finding love and pleasure, still couldn’t get it due to society rules and self-flagellation, and finally when he loses all his rationality, he ends up making the rest of his life as the worst of his life!

Did the irrationality in Ethan sprung-up due to his love for Mattie or the abomination towards his life? I presume the latter is true.

There is no effrontery but only submission!

“The return to reality was as painful as the return to consciousness after taking an anaesthetic. His body and brain ached with indescribable weariness, and he could think of nothing to say or to do that should arrest the mad flight of the moments”
I was restive and had a queer feeling throughout the read.

A queerly 3.5 stars!

‘The passion of rebellion had broken out of him again.’

Once the holidays are over and the grey soaks into everything, winter can be a ferocious and chilly beast. Edith Wharton transforms this bleak atmosphere into her own icy novella, the trepidatious tragedy Ethan Frome, in which we find a man trapped by his own circumstances in a melancholic Massachusetts countryside under ‘pale skies’ from which ‘sheets of snow perpetually renewed.’ It is a tale of morals and duty conflicted by desire. A landscape of loneliness. A story where one is shook by the silence of internal screaming further muffled out by the falling snow. Yet, for all the heavy themes and dread, Wharton’s prose proves rather sprightly and gives the story a welcomed lightness that makes it a quick and engaging read. Sharply addressing the social suffocation from traditional gender roles and the temptations of desire, Ethan Frome is a chilling little book where a man’s dreams to escape his circumstances must run up against the beleaguering external forces of life and duty. It's a disaster we see coming, yet you won't want to look away.

‘He lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access.’

A big thank you to emma and her review for recommending this one to me. Ethan Frome novel serves as a sort of character study of the titular character, Ethan Frome, one that is slowly sussed out by a narrator who has taken an interest in the slow, sullen man. It is an engaging framing that invites a sense of mystery as we wonder how the hard-working Ethan came to be such a ‘ruin of a man.’ They hear whispers and half-stories but ‘I had the sense that the deeper meaning of the story was in the gaps,’ and it isn’t until being forced by a snowstorm to spend the night on Ethan’s farm that they learn his history and how falling in love with his ailing wife’s cousin led to tragedy.

‘I began to see what life there—or rather its negation—must have been in Ethan Frome’s young manhood.’

There is a sense of Ethan as the literary “everyman,” being a stand-in for a humanity in his quest to break out of the harsh hand life dealt him, to assert a sense of free will against determinism. Ethan ‘with something bleak and unapproachable in his face’ is practically a mirror of the harsh world he lives in. ‘He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of it's frozen woe,’ Wharton writes, ‘with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface.’ Ethan’s father died young, his mother grew ill from loneliness and before she died had a young girl (Zeena) serve as her nurse, to whom Ethan would marry out of a sense of duty to keep the farm and family legacy going. But with Zeena—a city girl who resents their farm&now ill, bitter and aloof like his mother, Ethan’s desires turn to 21 year old Mattie, his wife’s cousin brought on as a live-in nurse. In Mattie and her vivaciousness, Ethan sees an escape from the cold farm and cold marriage, but Zeena may have taken notice and drops subtle hints of his burning desires for infidelity.

The color red is highly symbolic in the novel. A bright fiery color against a pale, grey landscape to symbolize life and passion. We see it in Mattie’s scarf, which signals to Ethan she is different from the rest, or in her red ribbons, and these flashes of red mark their growing intimacy. Though Zeena’s prized dish is also red, and Mattie’s accidental destruction of it is a nod to her presence shattering the long untouched and faded marriage between Zeena and Ethan. And Ethan’s attempts to glue it together don’t pass Zeena’s inspection, a rather clear metaphor of his attempts at subverting their marriage in secret being less discrete than he thought.

‘They stood together in the gloom of the spruces, an empty world glimmering about them wide and gray under the stars.’

Wharton explores how Ethan is pulled in two directions, one in his desires for Mattie but also towards his duty to his wife, the farm, and social expectations. Leaving an ill wife is not going to look good, and not just because they are in a religious community but because it's a pretty shit thing to do. Wharton does attempt to soften the reader to this moral conundrum by making Zeena rather harsh, though it should be remembered that mentions like ‘she had taken everything else from him’ is from a narrator, presumably male, that is empathetic to Ethan. And it is fairly ironic that Ethan tells Mattie ‘I want to do for you and care for you. I want to be there when you're sick and when you're lonesome,’ when this is exactly what he will be denying his wife (though the sense of duty feels less begrudging when given to someone one chooses for themselves instead of by social needs). Still, Zeena serves as a personification of all the external forces that have worked against Ethan his whole life.

‘All the long misery of his baffled past, of his youth of failure, hardship and vain effort, rose up in his soul in bitterness and seemed to take shape before him in the woman who at every turn had barred his way.’

We see a sense of determinism winning out, that ambition leads to folly, that one is confined by their circumstances and all attempts to escape lead to further disaster, though we also can detect a message that this need not be the only way. That society has set us up for this failure and society is itself a creation of ours.

This is most prominent in the way we see traditional gender roles as stifling here. Women are set up to fail and have no choice but the drudgery of household chores and servitude to a man. Mattie has no education beyond the ability to be a servant and women at the time were still not encouraged to seek higher education. And so, like her cousin before her, she had to serve a family and hope to be married into a reasonably liveable situation. Women were made to rely on a man, essentially. But also the traditional views of marriage, one made for “smart matchmaking” of being able to keep a farm and have a support instead of for love, also was often a path to resentment and loneliness. And divorce was still a huge social taboo. There is also some slight social class criticism, with Ethan bound to his low-income feeling resentment towards Denis Eady, a rich young man who positively invited a horse-whipping.’ Wharton shows how our lack of access to freedom and free will was largely at the mercy of a society that we can and should criticize to push public opinion towards progress.

Ethan Frome is a chilly little novel, but one that captures an incredible sense of icy atmosphere and dread in order to better juxtapose the burning desires of Ethan at the heart of this tale. Much different than Wharton’s usual, more comedic novels, this is still a sharp story gorgeously written that delivers quite the punch. A great little winter read.

3.5/5

‘They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods.’

HATE! Wharton as usual writes well enough to make you sympathetic with characters forever imprisoned in bleakly miserable lives with no hope of redemption. One would inflict this on oneself willingly WHY?

One of those books I read when I was young, but always thought I should read again. It was a quick read with an unexpected ending and held my attention to the end. Sometimes life makes us pay too high a price...I probably understand that better now than I would have in my 20s.

Like so many of Wharton's characters, Ethan Frome is searching for his place in the world and hoping for a happiness that is always just out of his reach. I suppose our sympathies ought to lie, to some extent, with Zenobia, the wronged wife, but how can they when she is so harsh and cruel. Aside from that, this is a very different novel from Wharton's other works. It is not about class. Frome isn't hungry to join the wealthier class, he is hungry to join the world. He wants to lead a life with meaning, and he is tied to a farm that holds him because of an accident of birth, and a woman who holds him because of an accident of circumstances.

Like all of Wharton's works, this one packs a lot into a small space. It does not stretch beyond what is needed, and the images of Ethan Frome that we see in the beginning become very poignant by the end.

I absolutely hated this book.

OK, two things were good. The author draws New England landscapes, particularly in winter, beautifully. Secondly, the book was exceedingly short, so my misery wasn't prolonged. I need to joke after reading this sad, dismal, depressing book. Jeez, how can people look at life with such eyes?! Stop griping and do something with your life. It is your own fault if you just sob and moan.

You follow a couple that is ill-fit. The reader has to listen to their arguments. On top of this, the wife, Zeena, is a hypochondriac. You have to listen to her sob story, complaints and grumbles. Ugh.

Then there is attraction that arises between the husband and the wife's cousin who has been taken into the house as a maid. This is so corny, and so melodramatically described. Overly sentimental too. At the same time there is no fire in this love, and you scarcely see how it develops. You are instead supposed to moan about the impossibility of it all.

What others may think is if of prime importance.


I know this is maybe going to irritate those who love this book. Please excuse me, but this is how I react to the book.

It doesn't get better; the end is pure maudlin.

I listened to the audiobook narrated by Elizabeth Klett. The speed varies. It is not always read too quickly, but much is. Each new chapter starts out at a good speed. Then she seems to get carried away by the story, causing her to read faster and faster. The tone, the voices she uses for the different characters, is fine, so this is quite a shame.

It wasn’t hard writing this review! I knew exactly what I had to say! If you are like me, avoid this book. It is depressing, sentimental and maudlin.

I knew of Ethan Frome as an apparently dreary book used to inflict tedium on American high schoolers. It seemed somehow separate from "Edith Wharton", who signified novels about rich young American women in Edwardian dresses, which I wasn't really interested in reading. (This is one of the points of history in which my general interest is lowest anyway, and adding that to Americans, and the typical 'marriage plot', well.) But if I'm finally to make inroads towards finishing a reading project that's been hanging about me since 1994, to read all the authors from The Divine Comedy's The Booklovers, some Edith Wharton must be read. It turned out that this one is handily very short, *and* one of the author's most canonical texts, thanks to said high schools *and* set in a down-at-heel rural milieu that I find more interesting to read about than yet another Buccaneer conquering an early-20th century drawing room.

(Such an American name, too, Ethan. For many years, the only Ethan I knew of was Ethan Hawke, one of those generic young actors whom teenage girls' magazines would inexplicably drool over in the early 90s - and the name always sounded to me as if it must be short for something else. Apparently it isn't. And in recent years it's become more popular in Britain.)

My sympathies to those who were bored into loathing this book; it can happen to anyone if the teaching is bad, or long-drawn-out for the benefit of lower-ability students in a class that's too mixed to work for all levels. Having had to bear an entire term on Of Mice and Men at GCSE - a book which I'm sure I'd have had no particular problem with if we'd dealt with it in two or three weeks - I think I can empathise. But if this was you with Ethan Frome, you probably haven't read this far anyway...

Elaine Showalter acknowledges in her introduction to this Oxford edition, "Generations of American readers have studied Ethan Frome as a set text in secondary school, less recommended, I suspect, for its artistic brilliance than for its brevity and absence of explicit sexual references." Mostly, the novel seems an absurd choice for the average modern teenager. There are plenty of essay-ready instances where one can point out symbolism, pathetic fallacy and the like, but its strengths are in beautiful descriptions of winter scenery, of details of the lifestyles of working-class rural New Englanders of the 1900s, and the subtle dynamics between two people who are attracted to one another but whom the morals of the day forbid from acting on it. However, in its favour, the dénouement is an antidote to the Romeo & Juliet trope of destroying oneself for impossible love, and many teachers no doubt feel responsibility to try and imprint this on their pupils. These ideas sit there in the mind for longer than the teenage years.

The framing narrative - in which an engineer goes to work in Starkfield, Mass., and becomes curious about taciturn local man Ethan Frome - has a class dimension it was surprising the introduction didn't touch on. Showalter explains that for Wharton, Ethan was a character exemplifying 'here but for the grace of God go I'. She had felt trapped in her relationship with a husband who was both sickly and difficult to live with - but the couple's wealth and social standing allowed them to go their separate ways, and for Teddy Wharton to pay for whatever assistance he needed. The opening narrator, a proxy for the reader, has a strong sense of entitlement to know about the details of the Fromes' lives, and manages to get an invitation into their home, as few locals have had for years. Ethan is also brighter than the average local, and went to the nearest college for a while, cutting short his degree because of responsibilities to his ailing parents. There is an implication that he is worth more, and more interesting, than the rest of them because of this. But on the other hand, most people in the 1910s who would reading what would now be called a literary novel *were* those with higher-than-average levels of education and those who either got out, or felt they should have got out, of places like Starkfield; it's also just attuned to its contemporary audience.

The sickly women of Starkfield can be read as a feminist indictment of what happened to women trapped in unfulfilling lives, suffering physical symptoms of depression as a result - one which can still be seen in works 50 years later (such as Simone de Beauvoir's Les Belles Images, which I read the same week as Ethan Frome). But it can also look like a snobbish condemnation of poor people failing to pull themselves together, as Zeena finds she can when she needs to become a carer again herself. This narrative is a product of its time in not having the theories available to explore and understand the causes of widespread ill-health in the area, which may well have been as complex as those for which Glasgow is notorious.

It's perhaps not since childhood that I read much fiction set in rural North America (Laura Ingalls Wilder, L.M. Montgomery, and other girls' classics of the late 19th and early 20th century). Because so much of what I've read about the American wilderness in adulthood has been via articles, mostly of a leftward and/or environmental bent, I hadn't quite grasped how white Americans thought of it as historically "theirs", and not that they were fairly new to it. Films and TV don't have the same sense of implicit history as a novel, somehow, and for all that the portrayal of Native peoples in the Little House books has been condemned, they are *there* and it's evident they were there first. After reading Trout Fishing in America and Ethan Frome, I'm starting to understand how white Americans' felt sense of connection to the land exists, and how it must feel normal, and how it's replicated across generations via stories like these.

It's easy to understand why a GR friend says Ethan Frome must be read in winter: the weather and setting are wonderfully atmospheric. But so much so that I found them vividly evocative on cooler, rainy summer days too. By no means all books are powerful enough to work so well out of season as this one did. Wharton gets one so effectively into the characters' heads that even if demographics suggest that a reader should have more sympathy with Zeena, one is drawn into Ethan's and Mattie's minds, and sympathy with them. Their dynamic with Zeena evokes that of teenagers trying to get out from under the thumb of an unreasonable parent. (Zeena even gets mad about the breakage of crockery.) I appreciate Wharton as an excellent writer now, of setting, characters and metaphors. I'd consider reading Summer or The Bunner Sisters, but the subjects of her major novels still don't appeal much: if I want to read about that upper-class milieu, I just prefer it to be set a little earlier or later in history.

This novel wrenched my heart in a way that I had not seen coming! For a novel that has only a few austere characters, whose nearest town is called Starkfield and which takes place in a bleak, wintry and isolated countryside, it packed a surprising punch, more than the other novels I’ve read by Wharton, most of which take place in upper-class, dazzling New York, a setting which most people, me included, would find much more compelling.

In the beginning I practically swooned at Wharton’s exquisite prose – so languid, so dwelling on small things, and meanwhile the quiet drama gradually sneaked up on me and caught me unawares.
The frame story is provided by an unnamed narrator, a traveler of some kind, who sees Ethan Frome from afar when he arrives in town and is told just enough about him to feel intrigued by this quiet, broken man. During a sleigh ride with Ethan Frome, a winter storm suddenly means the narrator has to spend the night at Ethan’s house – the first stranger to enter it in decades. And here the real story begins, in the form of a flashback to Ethan’s life twenty-four years before.

We are told the story about Ethan’s anguish in his loveless marriage to Zeena and his infatuation with Zeena’s cousin Mattie, who lives with them. And we are shown how people, especially Ethan, can feel desperately trapped in their lives – by poverty, by snow, by marriage.  I sympathized with Ethan, who is a good man despite his yearnings for another woman. Zeena, after all, is a miserable hypochondriac, but her sadness and entrapment, too, can be read between the lines. They are all, in different ways, victims.

The desolation was palpable. I felt the harsh winters, the painful and almost total lack of choice, the misery and missed chances. Such descriptions might at other times make me give a novel a wide berth, but in Wharton’s hands the story vibrated in me hours afterward, and I knew I had just read something quite wonderful.

4.5 stars