Ethan Frome
1911
The most devastating love story in American literature unfolds in a single frozen winter in Starkfield, Massachusetts. Edith Wharton wrote this novella in her most austere and unflinching voice, stripping away the glittering social satire that made her famous to tell a story of almost unbearable bleakness. Ethan Frome, a man broken by poverty and a crippling accident, has spent years tolerating his nagging, suspicious wife Zeena, until her cousin Mattie arrives and awakens in him a desperate, forbidden longing. What follows is a cascade of longing, jealousy, and impossible choices that builds toward one of fiction's most shattering conclusions. Wharton understood better than almost any writer how circumstance smothers desire, how the poverty and propriety of rural New England can become a prison. This is a book that leaves marks.
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“I want to put my hand out and touch you. I want to do for you and care for you. I want to be there when you're sick and when you're lonesome.””
— Edith Wharton
“They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods.””
— Edith Wharton
“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.””
— Edith Wharton
“She had taken everything else from him, and now she meant to take the one thing that made up for it all.””
— Edith Wharton
“But at sunset the clouds gathered again, bringing an earlier night, and the snow began to fall straight and steadily from a sky without wind, in a soft universal diffusion more confusing than the gusts and eddies of the morning. It seemed to be a part of the thickening darkness, to be the winter night itself descending on us layer by layer.””
— Edith Wharton
“They had never before avowed their inclination so openly, and Ethan, for a moment, had the illusion that he was a free man, wooing the girl he meant to marry. He looked at her hair and longed to touch it again, and to tell her that is smelt of the woods; but he had never learned to say such things.””
— Edith Wharton
“They stood together in the gloom of the spruces, an empty world glimmering about them wide and gray under the stars””
— Edith Wharton
“The return to reality was as painful as the return to consciousness after taking an anesthetic””
— Edith Wharton
“I had the sense that the deeper meaning of the story was in the gaps.””
— Edith Wharton
