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.
