After Zeena’s departure he and Mattie had stood speechless, neither seeking to approach the other.

To this retreat he descended as soon as the house was quiet, and Zeena’s steady breathing from the bed had assured him that there was to be no sequel to the scene in the kitchen. He still took refuge there in summer, but when Mattie came to live at the farm he had to give her his stove, and consequently the room was uninhabitable for several months of the year.

When Ethan was called back to the farm by his father’s illness his mother gave him, for his own use, a small room behind the untenanted “best parlour.” Here he had nailed up shelves for his books, built himself a box-sofa out of boards and a mattress, laid out his papers on a kitchen-table, hung on the rough plaster wall an engraving of Abraham Lincoln and a calendar with “Thoughts from the Poets,” and tried, with these meagre properties, to produce some likeness to the study of a “minister” who had been kind to him and lent him books when he was at Worcester. You should visit Browse Happy and update your internet browser today!

If you enjoyed Ethan Frome, you might like Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, also available in Penguin Classics.The embedded audio player requires a modern internet browser. In 1920, Wharton became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for literature with her novel The Age of Innocence. During her life she published more than forty volumes, including novels, stories, verse, essays, travel books and memoirs for years she published poetry and short stories in magazines, but the book that made Wharton famous was The House of Mirth (1905), which established her both as a writer of distinction and popular appeal. Different in both tone and theme from Wharton's other works, Ethan Frome has become perhaps her most enduring and most widely read novel.Įdith Wharton (1862-1937), born Edith Newbold Jones, was a member of a distinguished New York family said to be the basis for the idiom 'keeping up with the Joneses'.

In one of American fiction's finest and most intense narratives, Edith Wharton moves this ill-starred trio toward their tragic destinies. But when Zeenie's vivacious cousin enters their household as a 'hired girl', Ethan finds himself obsessed with her and with the possibilities for happiness she comes to represent. Set against the frozen waste of a harsh New England winter, Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome is a tale of despair, forbidden emotions, and sexual tensions, published with an introduction and notes by Elizabeth Ammons in Penguin Classics.Įthan Frome works his unproductive farm and struggles to maintain a bearable existence with his difficult, suspicious, and hypochondriac wife, Zeenie.

Wharton edith ethan frome