Ethan Frome

Description

A masterwork of American literature from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Age of Innocence. A marked departure from Edith Wharton's usual ironic contemplation of the fashionable New York society to which she belonged, Ethan Frome is a sharply etched portrait of the simple inhabitants of a nineteenth-century New England village. The protagonist, Ethan Frome, is a man tormented by a passionate love for his ailing wife's young cousin. Trapped by the bonds of marriage and the fear of public condemnation, he is ultimately destroyed by that which offers him the greatest chance at happiness. Like The House of Mirth and many of Edith Wharton's other novels, Ethan Frome centers on the power of local convention to smother the growth of the individual. Written with stark simplicity, this powerful and tragic novel has long been considered one of Wharton's greatest works.

The upper stratum of New York society into which Edith Wharton was born in 1862 provided her with an abundance of material as a novelist but did not encourage her growth as an artist. Educated by tutors and governesses, she was raised for only one career- marriage. But her marriage, in 1885, to Edward Wharton was an emotional disappointment, if not a disaster. She suffered the first of a series of nervous breakdowns in 1894. In spite of the strain of her marriage, or perhaps because of it, she began to write fiction and published her first story in 1889.Her first published book was a guide to interior decorating, but this was followed by several novels and story collections. They were written while the Whartons lived in Newport and New York, traveled in Europe, and built their grand home, the Mount, in Lenox, Massachusetts. In Europe, she met Henry James, who became her good friend, traveling companion, and the sternest but most careful critic of her fiction.The House of Mirth(1905) was both a resounding critical success and a bestseller, as wasEthan Frome(1911). In 1913 the Whartons were divorced, and Edith took up permanent residence in France.Her subject, however, remained America, especially the moneyed New York of her youth. Her great satiric novel,The Custom of the Countrywas published in 1913 andThe Age of Innocencewon her the Pulitzer Prize in 1921.In her later years, she enjoyed the admiration of a new generation of writers, including Sinclair Lewis and F. Scott Fitzgerald. In all, she wrote some 30 books, including an autobiography,A Backward Glance(1934). She died at her villa near Paris in 1937. Anita Shreve was a high school teacher and a freelance magazine journalist before writing fiction full time. She is the author over fifteen novels includingThe Stars Are Fireas well as the international bestsellerThe Pilot's Wife,andThe Weight of the Water, a finalist for the Orange Prize.Shreve teaches writing at Amherst College and lives in Massachusetts. Susanna Mooreis the author of the novels The Life of Objects,The Big Girls, One Last Look, In the Cut, Sleeping Beauties, The Whiteness of Bones,andMy Old Sweetheart,and two books of nonfiction,Light Years- A Girlhood in Hawai'iandI Myself Have Seen It- The Myth of Hawai'i. She lives in New York City.