Set in a harsh New England winter, this early 20th century fiction follows Ethan Frome, a man trapped between duty to his sickly wife and his growing attraction to her vibrant young cousin. Wharton crafts a stark tale of passion constrained by social expectations and economic hardship in rural Massachusetts.
The village lay under two feet of snow, with drifts at the windy corners. In a sky of iron the points of the Dipper hung like icicles and Orion flashed his cold fires. The moon had set, but the night was so transparent that the white house-fronts between the elms looked gray against the snow, clumps of bushes made black stains on it, and the basement windows of the church sent shafts of yellow light far across the endless undulations. Young Ethan Frome walked at a quick pace along the deserted street, past the bank and Michael Eady’s new brick store and Lawyer Varnum’s house with the two black Norway spruces at the gate. Opposite the Varnum gate, where the road fell away toward the Corbury valley, the church reared its slim white steeple and narrow peristyle. As the young man walked toward it the upper windows drew a black arcade along the side wall of the building, but from the lower op…Continue reading →
Born into New York's gilded age elite, this pioneering novelist became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1921. Her razor-sharp prose exposed the suffocating social conventions of America's upper class through masterworks like The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth, cementing her legacy as a master of psychological realism. All works by Edith Wharton →
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