”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.”

From the first pages, Wharton’s descriptions of the landscape, setting a scene and showing us all of the emotions attached to life in this time and this place. As my goodreads friend, Julie, has noted in referring to Wharton as “the queen of sparse prose,” it is how much emotion which she manages to place into so few pages that is notable and inspiring.

Set in the fictional small town of Starkfield, Massachusetts in time period around the late 1800s – early 1900s, where the winters can be brutal and isolating, Ethan’s farm encompasses enough land that neighbors are quite a distance away.

Ethan has lived in on his farm, in the house where he had lived with his mother, which is how his wife, Zeena, came into his life. Zeena was hired to care for his mother in her last years.

”After the funeral, when he saw Zeena preparing to go away, he was seized with an unreasoning dread of being left alone on the farm; and before he knew what he was doing he had asked her to stay there with him. He had often thought since that it would not have happened if his mother had died in spring instead of winter."

Now Zeena’s health is now poor, and she hires her cousin Mattie to help with chores and cooking, but regrets that decision when Mattie arrives. Mattie is both pretty and young, and so Zeena begins to make plans for her dismissal.

A tale of forbidden love, simply told, this story would not be the same in another place, another time or another season. The isolation, the feeling of being trapped in an unsatisfactory life, the desperation of desiring a life we envisioned, one including happiness, feeling defeated by living ”in Starkfield for too many winters.” All add another layer, as if Winter, the seemingly never-ending season, were another character steering their lamentable state of affairs.

I’ve wanted to read this one for a while now, and am so pleased to have finally made time for it. Many thanks to Julie, whose review had me move this to my January reads.

Julie’s review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Wow! I went into this one still processing the last book I read (Call Me By Your Name) and thinking maybe a novella and a few short stories would be a great way to ease into something else. It worked!

3rd book of 2022

Wharton had a true gift for crafting sparse, beautiful prose. Sensual tensions pervade throughout the narrative of Ethan Frome, as well as throughout the characters interactions, particularly those between Ethan and Mattie.

This was a quick read for me, but one that I truly enjoyed. Would recommend! Four stars.

“The passion of rebellion had broken out of him again. That which had seemed incredible in the sober light of day had really come to pass, and he was to assist as a helpless spectator at Mattie’s banishment. His manhood was humbled by the part he was compelled to play and by the thought of what Mattie must think of him. Confused impulses struggled in him as he strode along to the village”.

“For a moment, he had the illusion that he was a free man, wooing the girl he meant to marry”.

Such a sad story

There is a lot of emotion packed into this haunting cautionary tale of forbidden love.  Set in old fashioned (circa early 1900’s) rural Massachusetts, it is written of the poor society, unlike other books I’ve read by this author.  It is a thought provoking read and addresses hardships and the moral choices made despite them.  The characters Ethan and Mattie were developed in such a way that the reader has compassion for them despite their moral dilemma of Ethan’s difficult marriage.   These characters and the ultimate fate of their love will stay with me for a long time.  I loved this book and although it is sad, it is not a difficult read, and I was drawn in from the very first page.  If you like Edith Wharton, or just want to sample her works, I highly recommend this one.  It is short enough to be read in one sitting.

Fascinating novella by a wonderful writer. Ethan Frome is trapped - in a cold winter and a cold marriage. When love presents itself, he is desperate to change his circumstances. The tension and atmosphere Wharton creates in such a short piece, is impressive. Perhaps a little high on the melodrama  (sledding never occurred to me as an efficient suicide method before)  ... but otherwise, this piece has depth, and made me think.

7.0/10

I do love me some melodrama -- I really do -- and sometimes one just savours it.

But there are times when you just toss the book back into the library slot, and Pffft! like a bad dream, it's already forgotten, except for a faint echo of the doom-and-gloom wintery landscape.

I'm being completely irreverent, I realize, when I suggest a better name for Ethan might have been Eeyore, and so I bow with humility in the face of all those who loved and lost -- and raved about Ethan. But. My. God.

While I understand, very well, that the forces that shape us are often unseen and unexpected; that our lives hang by Fates more often than they hang by our own design, in this instance Wharton failed her character completely; or conversely he failed her. I don't think Wharton had enough of a grasp of the Fromes of the world -- she was just one second behind the beat, at every turn: just couldn't synchronize true poverty and despair with anguish and defeat, for the life of her. She might have understood the anguish of the "rich and famous", but she's a step behind on that "poverty thing."

The novel sounds so hopelessly contrived, that I'm surprised I'm giving her such a high rating.

I think the language moved me -- the language of landscape, that is: for that, Wharton has a keen eye, deep appreciation and true understanding.

As for Eeyore, ahem ... Ethan ... there are straw scarecrows with more backbone and substance.

To marry someone because she was ... there?? Obviously, Ethan left all the wit he had back at Worcester college where he studied; and so it seems to me this book would be better termed Just Desserts.

He's not a sympathetic character for me because he bears the signs of a creature observed, and painted, rather than of someone whom one knows and understands.

Perhaps unwittingly, Wharton herself avows this approach to the novel. In discussing her work with Daniel Berkeley Updike, from Merrymount Press, Wharton said to him:

One wintry autumn afternoon we were driving in the country near Lenox, and on the top of a hill on the left of the road stood a battered two-story house, unpainted, with a neglected door-yard tenanted by hens and chickens and a few bedraggled children sitting on the stone steps before the door. 'It is about a place like that,' said Mrs. Wharton, 'that I mean to write a story.' Only last week I went to the village meeting-house [church] and sat there for an hour alone, trying to think what such lives would be and some day I shall write a book about it.'

Sat there for an hour.

I've given more thought to this review than she gave to the likes of Frome.

Unfair on my part? Undoubtedly.

Still ... it's the kind of thing that we pick up on, and nit pick, a century after the fact. But it's not completely unwarranted on my part.

While writers glean inspiration from everything in life, it feels much too contrived to me, to sit and "observe a population", like a scientist and then try to deliver a moral tale on the subject. It seems to me that two disparate forces are at play, and that's probably why this doesn't work for me. It's jarring. It's inauthentic.

I read Wharton's own marital debacle, in this novel, more than I read a true portrait of Ethan. Zeenia seems to be an exorcism of Teddy Wharton, her hubby, who suffered from horrific depression; was more than a little bit of a cad even when he was sane; and, ultimately, in the nut-house department would have given even Mrs. Rochester a run for her money.

Frome is weak and lazily sketched; Zeenia, Xenophobia, Zenobia* is a caricature (even if not a downright literary assassination) of her hubby; and Mattie is barely a ghost in all of this, representing Ethan's ephemeral longing for a last hurrah for freedom. Even in this, he proves to be rather spineless -- but in the end manages only to damage Mattie's spine. What (silly, silly) irony!

And so, to wrap up this review like a proper grammar-school essay, "I like Wharton quite a bit when she sticks to things she knows something about."


* Wikipedia tells me: Zenobia was a cultured monarch and fostered an intellectual environment in her court, which was open to scholars and philosophers. She was tolerant toward her subjects and protected religious minorities. The queen maintained a stable administration which governed a multicultural multiethnic empire. Zenobia died after 274, and many tales have been recorded about her fate. Her rise and fall have inspired historians, artists and novelists, and she is a patriotic symbol in Syria.

Huh. Who knew?!

In this delicious irony, maybe it's the one point Wharton got right.

Because Edith Wharton was born in 1862 and this novel was written in 1911, I’ve always resisted reading the story fearing that it might contain florid prose and descriptions, which are often mind-numbing for me. Not only did I love it, I was reminded of one of my all time favorite novels, Stoner.

Ethan Frome was a mostly money strapped farmer in a miserable marriage while Stoner was raised by hard-working farm people. Both men were married to wives that were cold hearted, passive-aggressive and cruel.

Zenobia "Zeena" Frome is a hypochondriac but also cunning; and, she uses her obscure ailments to derail Ethan’s love affair with her young and beautiful cousin, Mattie Silver.

Stoner’s wife Edith, also demanding and manipulative, converted Stoner’s den into her art studio in order to deliberately thwart the shared time with his beloved daughter, Grace while he worked and she did her homework.

Ethan Frome and William Stoner were both wonderful characters in literature. I thoroughly enjoyed this novel and found the story compelling. But, I adored Stoner. My rating only reflects that this one suffers by comparison...not that it wasn't well-written and absorbing.

71st book of 2021. Artist for this review is American painter Aldro Thompson Hibbard (1886–1972).

3.5. My first Wharton. The prose impressed me at first and though I found it at times a bit too heavy, reminiscent of Henry James, as she's so often compared, I thought the atmosphere of the wintery Massachusetts landscape was captured beautifully.
n  

They walked on in silence through the blackness of the hemlock-shaded lane, where Ethan's saw-mill gloomed through the night, and out again into the comparative clearness of the fields. On the farther side of the hemlock belt the open country rolled away before them grey and lonely under the stars.

n

"Snow Mantle"

Bloom says that "Ethan Frome is Wharton's only fiction to have become part of American mythology...". Like The Scarlet Letter, I've often considered it one of those short American classics that one must read. It appears that this is read frequently read in schools in America as The Scarlet Letter is. It's a framed narrative, as the period favoured: Ethan Frome is a mysterious man with a limp, observed by an unnamed narrator in the fictional town of Starkfield, Massachusetts. The narrative then takes us into the past to explore Frome's past, before returning, in the final chapter, to the present. It's a bleak story, pushed deeper with the thick snow and muffled quiet of the winters. Though it's clear that Wharton has great technical skill as a writer, I found the middle of the novella waned. The ending is rather abrupt but I liked the final hanging note and sentiment, depressing as it is. For a novella that can be read in a day, I would not dismiss it, it's importance in American literature notwithstanding. Gore Vidal calls Wharton and Henry James the "benign gods of our American literature."


"Winter Afternoon, Belmont, Massachusetts"—1918

I've got Summer, Bunner Sisters, The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence now to read too. With Wharton's writing and evident skill, I am eager to read her larger works. Ethan Frome is a soft, silent, but tragic entry into her body of work.

Se ci si ferma ad una prima analisi fredda e razionale, questo racconto lungo (o romanzo breve) non è esente da imperfezioni: il finale è parzialmente telefonato, alcuni dettagli della trama sono un po' ingenui e qualche scambio di battute tra i protagonisti risulta un po' goffo.

Ma se si fa un solo passo in più, impossibile non percepire il minuzioso lavoro di cesellatura svolto dall'autrice, impossibile non percepire la profondità emotiva della storia, altro che sturm und drang. Personalmente l'ho trovato superiore a Cime tempestose cui l'ho visto paragonato in più di una recensione: più diretto eppure più elegante. E' come un merletto di Burano: si può dire "non è il mio genere", si può dire "non sta bene nel mio salotto", ma non si può non riconoscerne il valore.

A ben vedere non è nemmeno una storia romantica: è la storia di una sorta di maleficio o maledizione, è quasi parente del poema sinfonico Una notte sul monte calvo, perché sotto i panni di una donna malata e precocemente invecchiata si cela la cattiveria fatta persona, una vera e propria strega. E sotto la maledizione e la stregoneria si cela una verità ancora più cupa e profonda: la persone sofferenti nel corpo o nello spirito (o in tutt'e due), inacidiscono e incattiviscono ed esigono vendetta al cospetto del mondo intero.

La grande quantità di neve, dal punto di vista razionale, ha una spiegazione assai semplice: l'azione principale si svolge in pieno inverno. Ma per quanto riguarda l'aspetto emozionale sommergerà il lettore ben più del necessario, al punto da farlo sentire coinvolto e avvolto dal freddo siderale anche se l'atto della lettura avviene, come nel mio caso, sotto il sole particolarmente brillante e tiepido dei primi di ottobre.

Classico gioiellino scoperto per caso, a ben vedere fa il paio anche con Casa d'altri di Silvio D'Arzo. Quattro stelle convinte.

I woke up this morning and decided to pick up a small, cozy, cute little book. The cover for Ethan Frome was perfect! Snowy, just like what I was seeing outside. I brewed some coffee and kicked back, not realizing that the cover was meant to represent a New England winter.

Honestly, I could cut it right there. I just spiraled down into sadness and melancholy. I was frustrated and angry, wanting to put down the book and walk away, but not being able to justify doing so with a 99-page work. Ethan! Give me a HUG! I also found it fascinating that Edith Wharton had the capability of capturing the male psyche so crisply, blatantly throwing up the middle finger at the hackneyed “Write what you know”.

Yeah… this was not the cozy Sunday I had imagined. Thanks Edith.

Jesus H Christ but this is bleak stuff! Even the town name Wharton chose, Starkfield....holy shit, hide the guns, rope and knives!

I was born and raised in New England, wandering about the wooded, hilly landscapes of Massachusetts, Vahmont, New Hampshah and Maine for much of my youth. The springs and summers were green and alive. The autumns and winters were dark and dead. So half the year was glorious, good times and the other half you spent desperately trying to survive while wondering if it wouldn't be better to let the icy roads have their way and let your car fly off a bridge. Ethan Frome is solidly stuck in the latter.

The story of Ethan, a troubled married man in love with another woman, is revealed through deft flashbacks. Though I found the dramatic climax, the tragic sled ride, a touch melodramatic, this is otherwise excellent reality writing. Life does not work out the way you want or expect it sometimes, Wharton is saying. Her ironic twists are not so very fantastical, but rather they are the necessary conclusion.

If you like when hopes and dreams are mercilessly dashed, read away! If you relish ruin and decay, have at it! But do read Ethan Frome, do.