Ethan Frome: Edith Wharton’s Coldest Book

Edith Wharton is the great novelist of old New York’s gilded drawing-rooms. Ethan Frome is her startling escape from them — a short, brutal, frozen tragedy set among the poor farmers of rural New England, and the bleakest thing she ever wrote.

Ethan is a silent, defeated man, trapped on a failing farm with a sour, sickly wife, Zeena. When Zeena’s young cousin Mattie comes to help in the house, Ethan falls, hopelessly and wordlessly, in love — and the novel becomes an unbearable study of two decent people longing for a life they will never be allowed to have. Wharton frames it all in a New England winter so cold it becomes a character: the snow, the silence, the isolation pressing the life out of everyone.

And then the ending — one of the cruellest in American fiction, a single reckless act whose consequences do not release the lovers but chain them together in a fate worse than the one they fled. Wharton, mistress of the social novel, here strips away society entirely and shows what the trap of poverty and duty does to the human heart when there is no escape at all.

This edition gathers it among the works of Edith Wharton, beside The House of Mirth.

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