Ethan Frome

Description

One of American fiction's finest and most intense narratives, Ethan Frome tells a story of ill-starred lovers and their tragic destinies. The Penguin English Library Edition of Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton 'He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of its frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface' Ethan Frome works his unproductive farm and struggles to maintain a bearable existence with his difficult, suspicious and hypochondriac wife, Zeena. But when Zeena's vivacious cousin enters their household as a 'hired girl', Ethan finds himself obsessed with her and with the possibilities for happiness she comes to represent. In one of American fiction's finest and most intense narratives, Edith Wharton moves this ill-starred trio towards their tragic destinies. The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the beginning of the First World War.

Edith Newbold Jones (Edith Wharton) (1862-1937) was born in New York City during the American Civil War. She enjoyed a diverse and very successful career as interior and garden designer, short story writer and celebrated novelist, and was the first woman to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Wharton found inspiration for Ethan Frome's tragic denouement in an actual event in Lenox, Massachusetts, one of the victims of which she met personally. The House of Mirth is also published in the Penguin English Library.