First published in 1911, Ethan Frome is widely regarded as
Edith Wharton's most revealing novel and her finest
achievement in fiction. Set in the bleak, barren winter
landscape of New England, it is the tragic tale of a simple
man, bound to the demands of his farm and his tyrannical,
sickly wife, Zeena, and driven by his star-crossed love for
Zeena's young cousin, Mattie Silver. "In its spare, chilling
creation of rural isolation, hardscrabble poverty and wintry
landscape," writes Alfred Kazin in his afterword, "Ethan
Frome overwhelms the reader as a drama of irresistible
necessity." An exemplary work of literary realism in setting
and character, Ethan Frome stands as one of the great
classics of twentieth-century American literature.
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