Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

This is a masterpiece of story-telling. It is short - about 130 pages - and tells the tale of a man living an isolated life in New England. The time is not specific, but the feel is always contemporary with the date of publication, which was 1911. The narrator met Ethan Frome in Starkfield, Massachusetts and immediately his countenance made its impression. He is described as already looking “as if he was dead and in hell.” The narrator sets about telling the story of Ethan Frome, a story that apparently is hard to extract from the laconic people who inhabit this part of New England. The structure of the novel, we are told, reflects this local habit, but by the time we are half way through, the reticence seems to have eased.

Starkfield is a harsh place. Winters are particularly difficult, and people measure lifespan by the number of winters they have survived. This is not a sociable community, we are told, and people live isolated lives. It is an isolation that in some ways is dictated by their environment. “Beyond the orchard lay a field or two, the boundaries lost under drifts; and above the fields, huddled against the white immensities of land and sky, one of those lonely New England farmhouses that make the landscape lonelier.” It is thus a place where the distance between people renders everything lonelier.

Ethan Frome has a sick wife. She needs a home help, live-in assistance. Mattie Silver is hired. She is young, full of life and frankly not much of a help. She is a relative of Ethan Frome’s wife, Zelda, and so is tolerated. Ethan is attracted. Mattie changes his life.

What happens is so important to the story that how it happens cannot be described. Let it be said that what appears to be a simple love triangle does not turn out to be so. Though reticent, these people live charged emotional lives and conflict is never far removed from the cold. 

Edith Wharton’s prose is wonderfully evocative of this isolated and inward-looking community. In her fiction, she is generally an urban creature, wandering the society events of New York, describing the nuances of class politics among the well-to-do. The fact that in Ethan Frome she inhabits a quite different environment with fundamentally different people living different lives is testament to her skill as a writer.