Ethan Frome

Edith Wharton (1862-1937)

A nameless engineer arrives in the decaying Massachusetts mill town of Starkfield and, stranded by a winter storm, lodges with Ethan Frome, a tall, lame, silent farmer whose ruined body and ruined farm are the talk of the village. What the narrator pieces together from neighbors' memories is the story this book tells. Twenty-five years earlier, Ethan was a young man with a knack for engineering and a hope of leaving the farm for a life in town. Instead he stayed to bury his parents, then married Zenobia, one of the nurses who helped tend them. Zeena turned out to be a hypochondriac, silent and sour, and the farm sank deeper into debt and snow. When her cousin Mattie Silver, an orphan with no money and no prospects, comes to help with the housework, her warmth and laugh bring the kitchen alive, and Ethan discovers in himself a capacity for feeling that his marriage had buried. Over a single winter, as Zeena's suspicions harden and a trip to town brings a decisive answer about Mattie's future, Ethan is caught between duty, poverty, and a love he cannot speak. The whole story moves toward one evening and one mad, desperate ride down the snowy hill past the old elm, with tragic consequences. First published in 1911, Ethan Frome is Wharton's spare New England tragedy, a compact study of conscience and circumstance in which the frame narrative returns at the end to show how completely a single choice can shape a life.

Public domain in the United States; text sourced from Project Gutenberg.