One of my favorite novels is Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton. I first read it when I was 16, for my high school English class my junior year. It wasn’t required reading; my final class term paper was on three novelists of the Realist period – Wharton, Willa Cather, and Jack London. I found myself walloped by Wharton’s novel; I went on to read The House of Mirth and Age of Innocence and discovered that Ethan Frome was the major exception to what she usually wrote.
Wharton (1862-1937) came from New York upper class families on both sides. And it was the upper class that she usually wrote about. Ethan Frome is the story of a New England villager who experienced an accident, as his fellow residents of Starkfield, Massachusetts, will tell you. The story begins more than two decades after the “smashup;” only gradually do we learn what actually happened. A man whose life was filled with misery made a single dash for freedom and happiness, only to compound his misery with tragedy.
To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.
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