Ethan Frome

Lore & Background

The story begins with a nameless male narrator who works for a power plant and, due to a carpenters' strike, spends a winter in the small fictional town of Starkfield, Massachusetts. He is chauffeured daily by a limping, quiet man named Ethan Frome, a lifelong resident. The narrator learns that Frome's limp arose from an accident. The narrative then flashes back 24 years to detail Frome's past. Young Ethan is married to a sickly, unkind woman named Zeena, who seeks expensive treatments for her varied illnesses. The Fromes have taken in Zeena's poor cousin Mattie, with whom Ethan falls in love. Zeena, possibly suspecting the affair, arranges to send Mattie away, claiming she needs a hired maid. Ethan considers eloping but cannot obtain money and feels guilty about abandoning Zeena. He takes Mattie to the train station, but they stop at a hill to sled. Mattie suggests a suicide pact: they steer the sled into a big elm tree. The crash leaves both alive but permanently disfigured—Ethan with a limp, Mattie paralyzed. In the present, the narrator is forced by a blizzard to stay at the Frome house, witnessing an unhappy scene: Mattie and the Fromes live together, with Zeena as Mattie's caregiver. Mattie has developed an irritable disposition, and Zeena has become a caretaker.

Reader's Guide

Wharton began the story as a French-language composition while studying in Paris. She later transformed it into a novel, basing her sense of New England culture on her ten years at The Mount in Lenox, Massachusetts. She read portions daily to her friend Walter Berry. The sledding accident was likely based on a real 1904 Lenox crash, in which five people (four girls, one boy) hit a lamppost on Courthouse Hill. One girl, Emily Hazel Crosby, died. Wharton learned of it from a survivor, Kate Spencer, who had hip and facial injuries; they became friends while working at the Lenox Library. This is one of Wharton’s few rural works. She found the crash irresistible as a metaphor for a secret love affair’s wrongdoings. Lenox is also where Wharton encountered one of the victims; victims are buried near Wharton’s family. In her introduction, she writes of New England’s “outcropping granite,” its austere land, and its stoic people. The novel frequently mentions larch, elm, pine, and hemlock trees. The New York Times called the book “a compelling and haunting story.” Wharton made it distinct from her other works by setting it outside the elite upper class, though her characters still face the same conflict between duty and desire. She began writing it in the early 1900s while still married. Critic Lionel Trilling faulted it for lacking moral significance, saying the ending is “terrible to contemplate” but that “the mind can do nothing with it, can only endure it.” Jeffrey Lilburn notes some readers find the suffering bleak and dull, while others see the difficulty.

Did You Know?

• Wharton began Ethan Frome as a French-language composition while studying in Paris.
• The sledding accident was likely based on a real 1904 Lenox crash in which five people hit a lamppost on Courthouse Hill; one girl, Emily Hazel Crosby, died.
• Wharton learned of the real crash from a survivor, Kate Spencer, who suffered hip and facial injuries; they became friends while working at the Lenox Library.
• Wharton read portions of the novella daily to her friend Walter Berry, an international lawyer.
• The Mount in Lenox, Massachusetts, where Wharton lived for ten years, provided the basis for the New England setting.