Fiction · 1911
Ethan Frome
A visitor to a bleak Massachusetts hill town pieces together the story of a lame farmer: his sick, exacting wife Zeena, her young cousin Mattie Silver who came to keep house, and a sled ride one winter night.
Edith Wharton published the short novel in 1911. It is unlike the rest of her work in setting and in class — no drawing rooms, no money, no society to be judged by — and it is often the first of her books a reader meets. What holds it together is the frame: the narrator arrives twenty-four years after the fact and has to assemble the story out of what the people of Starkfield will not say.
The nine chapters and the frame that encloses them are given complete.
Contents
New editions
Never lose your place.
This book is free to read in full, and stays that way. Leave an address: one click confirms it and opens a free account, so your progress and bookmarks sync across every device. You'll also hear when the next restored edition enters the archive. Terminate at any time.
Subjects
About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
Part of Short Classics.
Source mind
About the author
1862–1937 · Modern
Edith Wharton (1862–1937) was born Edith Newbold Jones into old New York society, published her first book, on interior decoration, in 1897, and her first novel in 1902. The House of Mirth (1905), Ethan Frome (1911), The Custom of the Country (1913) and The Age of Innocence (1920), which won the Pulitzer Prize, are the best known of more than forty books. She lived in France from 1907 and was decorated for her relief work in the First World War.
Adjacent records
