Ethan Frome – Edith Wharton

READ FOR BOOKCLUB
Chosen by Jo

Through the eyes of a visitor, the reader observes Ethan Frome falling in love with his wife’s niece while stuck on a desolate farm in a harsh setting.

The niece is Mattie Silver. She arrives in the mountain village of Starkfield to help with housekeeping for her cousin Zeena, the sickly, cantankerous wife of Ethan. Ethan has long been resigned to caring for his ailing wife but is drawn to Mattie’s youthful beauty and energy. As the story progresses, Ethan’s vitality and hopes are refocused but a little bit obsessive.

The books talks of loneliness, frustration and moral responsibility in an economical and unsentimental style to represent the frigidity of the Massachusetts winter.

He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of it’s frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface; but there was nothing nothing unfriendly in his silence. I simply felt that he lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I had the sense that his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight, tragic as I guessed that to be, but had in it, as Harmon Gow had hinted, the profound accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters.

❍ “Thwarted dreams, transformation and confinement are some of the themes that run through this tragic love story. Ethan Frome could have had a very different life if he had escaped the land of broken dreams – Starkfield, Massachusetts. There is a strong sense of dread and the final twisted truth is shockingly satisfying. I loved the doomed love story and the slow build up of tension. A very enjoyable read.” – Jo

❍ “A seemingly simple story full of descriptive imagery and character studies. The language is efficient and meaningful and as such built the story using all the senses. I connected with Ethan Frome and the women in his life, despite their misgivings, and was captivated by their twisted love stories.” – Rachel

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Published 1911
Scribner’s
195 pages