Ethan Frome and Other Short Fiction by Edith Wharton

Ethan Frome and Other Short Fiction Reviews

• 
  Jim Fonseca

  The story (a novella – less than 100 pages) concerns a man with severe physical handicaps and how a visitor to a small New England town learned his story. The man is 52 and the accident happened when he was 21. The story was published in 1911 so we’re still in the horse and buggy days.
  
  
  
  
  With his handicaps, the visitor asks ‘who cares for him’ and learns that ‘he does the caring,’ first for his parents and then for his always-sick wife, who is 7 years older than him. Since he is a farmer and a logger he struggles to get by and they live in a deteriorating house.
  
  We learn that the accident involves a love story – he fell in love with his wife’s young working girl who did the housework and helped care for his wife.
  
  
  
  It’s about loneliness, lost love, tragedy and being a “prisoner for life.”
  
  I read this story years ago but re-learned an appreciation for Edith Wharton’s excellent writing and style. I think I’ll read her most popular book, Age of Innocence.
  
  Some examples of what I thought was good writing:
  
  [While he watches the girl sew] “The sudden heat of his tone made her color mount again, not with a rush, but gradually, delicately, like the reflection of the thought stealing slowly across her heart. She sat silent, her hands clasped on her work, and it seemed to him that a warm current flowed toward him along the strip of stuff that still lay unrolled between them. Cautiously he slid his hand palm-downward along the table till his finger-tips touched the end of the stuff. A faint vibration of her lashes seemed to show that she was aware of his gesture, and that it had sent a counter-current back to her; and she let her hands lie motionless on the other end of the strip.”
  
  “ ‘I’ve got complications,’ she [his wife] said. … Ethan knew the word for one of exceptional import. Almost everybody in the neighborhood had ‘troubles,’ frankly localized and specified; but only the chosen had ‘complications.’ To have them was in itself a distinction, though it was also, in most cases, a death-warrant. People struggled on for years with ‘troubles’ but they almost always succumbed to ‘complications.’ ”
  
  
  
  
  
  The last lines of the novella: “…and the way they are now, I don’t see’s there’s much difference between the Fromes up at the farm and the Fromes down in the graveyard; ‘cept that down there they’re all quiet, and the women have got to hold their tongues.”
  
  A good read.
  
  Photos from top: Hampton, New Hampshire
  Sledding in 1910 from s3.amazonaws.com
  The author from cdn.nybooks.com
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• 
  Amber

  Sadness. The ultimate feeling I have upon leaving behind Ethan Frome is one of infinite sadness. Sadness for people stuck - stuck in poverty, stuck in relationships that lack even friendliness, let alone love, stuck in a life they can never leave behind. To watch the transformation of Ethan and Mattie from people filled with such passion to people so broken and alone filled me with such an ache.
  
  That's the kind of story Ethan Frome is - one that leaves me aching. Aching with sadness for happiness lost, aching with gratitude and love for my own life (and love), aching to grab those near to me and shower them with affection simply because we are all here together.
  
  It is a story full of starkness. Stark imagery of a stark landscape, stark people stuck in a place of dark and harrowing winter. But there's a sort of stark beauty, as well, in people that go on living.
• 
  Julia

  The five stars are for “The Touchstone” and “Xingu,” some of my new favorite short stories. The others I would give 3s and 4s.
• 
  Tyler Brown

  The Touchstone and Xingu were some of the best pieces of short fiction I’ve read. Worth five stars for those two. Ethan Frome is a heavy, achy sort of work, but compelling and rich.
• 
  Andreea

  I liked Ethan Frome and Xingu.
• 
  Markelle

  I am glad I read (listened to) this book-a classic. I love the setting in a time where manners, politeness and duty prevail over passion and desire even though it can make for a painful or much less happy life but honor is king so Ethan fulfills his duty as husband to care for his wife even though their is no love. And the one he loves can not be his. Definitely not the ending of fairytales. Short but not sweet story.
• 
  Dessy Pingelova

  Straightforward, witty, and easy to understand writing. I quite enjoyed reading it.
• 
  Roz

  "Ethan Frome" is a story within a story. It is the tale of what happened to Ethan in the past, told from the perspective of a narrator who arrives in the town a few decades after the incident.
  
  A captivating read which is bound to get one's blood pressure up as times were different then. It shows the strength of character of a man who has had his dreams dashed due to tragedy and one really dreadful wife. Need I say more.
• 
  Al

  Ethan Frome is a reread; still an amazing story, and so different from most of Ms. Wharton's other work. The other short stories included in this edition are drawn from the same New York society world as Ms. Wharton's better-known novels. They are good, but don't pack the power of The Age of Innocence. Her gimlet eye must have caused many New Yorkers to squirm when she published, and she still has a message for us today even if the privileged world she describes has morphed into something very different.
• 
  Victoria Foote-Blackman

  If Edith Wharton had been a man she would hands down have been declared America's most important 19th century novelist. She makes the other literary giants of that period seem either desiccated or myopic or both, despite their great story-telling capacities; and I do include Herman Melville, Nathanial Hawthorne, Mark Twain and even Henry James in the equation. No, Wharton--above them all--truly understands the homo sapien mind. Like no other talent she knows how to slow-reveal the truth of human nature, reeling in the reader with the skill of an expert angler.
  
  This collection includes "Ethan Frome," Wharton’s justly celebrated long story of a lonely farmer, his hypochondriac wife, and the young and too pretty wide-eyed cousin who trips lightly into the claustrophobic bleakness of their New England winter.
  
  This small paperback also includes such masterpieces as "The Touchstone," a kind of Tell-Tale Heart of the leisure classes that explores the impact of a man selling a famous woman's love letters with a microscopic look at human self-deception and paranoia; all this is done with psychological insight far ahead of Wharton's era. Wharton excels at slowly dredging up for her readers the small and subtle but accumulating clues to people's complex identities and flourishing foibles.
  
  This is evident in her other fascinating story, "The Last Asset," in which a narrator recounts the small orbit of innocents who are caught in the web of an ice-cold and manipulative social climber.
  
  "Xingu" also explores class and craving with a delightful romp into a pretentious ladies' Lit group who have lost all sense of what they're reading in favor of why: intellectual one upmanship, until a charming intruder milks their silly airs for all it's worth.
  
  The last story, "The Other Two," is psychologically astute as well. The plot deals with a woman and the awkward relations among her three consecutive husbands. Wharton is weakest here, though, perhaps because divorce was a subject that was too close to Wharton's own marital woes.
  
  While most of the main characters are abject in their blindness to their own motives and inevitably injurious to others, there is always a glint of redemption; in this Pandora's Box of avaricious and self-centered center-stagers there is always, in the wings the figure of Hope, a gentle but perceptive nature who redeems humanity for us and shows that the human cause is perhaps not entirely lost.
• 
  Ambar

  Ahora entiendo porque dicen que es superior a sus obras mayores ( eso que aun no las leo todas) pero en 100 paginas y algo Edith hace que esta historia te cale en lo hondo de tu ser , que sufras , que quieras ayudarles a los protagonistas de esa vida , donde vemos el poder que tiene el dinero que sin este no eres capaz de nada , y como esto afecta a quienes menos tienen y se encuentran viviendo en lugares desiertos , como ahí algunos que tienen la felicidad a su alcance pero que no pueden tomarla.
  La ambientaciones maravillosa , no quería que acábese pus era feliz en esa pequeña casita de madera en medio de la nieve , creo que es una historia que estará siempre en mi mente pues ese final no me lo esperaba tiene un giro bastante grande .
• 
  Engi

  3.5
  
  “even in his unhappiest moments field and sky spoke to him with a deep and powerful persuasion”
  
  “You must write to me sometimes, Ethan.”
  “Oh, what good’ll writing do? I want to put my hand out and touch you. I want to do for you and care for you. I want to be there when you’re sick and when you’re lonesome.”
  
  The short stories after Ethan Frome were also very interesting or funny, especially Afterward and Xingu
  
  “Bernald had always fancied that she might have been pretty if she had not been perpetually explaining things.”
  
  “there was nothing Mrs. Plinth so much disliked as being asked her opinion of a book. Books were written to read; if one read them what more could be expected?”
  
• 
  Joe Rodeck

  Miserable tale of a struggling farmer with a grouchy wife who falls in love with a younger relative of hers whom wifey doesn’t like from the start. I might have liked this lech story as tragedy or psychological study. I might have admired the literary realism. But I felt cheated at the unsatisfying conclusion. We’re left to guess the extent of the injuries to a couple of main characters.
  
  *Ethan Frome* probably had more sex appeal in 1911 that may have accounted for its success then.
  
• 
  Ashley Kennedy

  Decided to reread Ethan Frome for the first time since high school English class because all I remembered about it was that it was depressing and had something to do with sledding. For the record, my recollection was accurate. This time, the version I read also included short stories which were all new to me. Not a fan of "Afterward" because it's a ghost story, but I really enjoyed "The Legend" which pokes fun at snooty intellectuals.
• 
  Margaret

  Ethan Frome, a poor New England farmer lives with his austere, sickly, hypochondriac wife and their help, his wife's cousin, Mattie. Every day is a struggle. Ethan becomes obsessed with this young woman, and the story explores his story to its dreadful conclusion. The landscape, Ethan's longings and despair, his bitter isolation are all explored in a book which, despite its bleakness, is hard to put down.
• 
  Cate

  As a Vermonter, I could picture the snowy landscapes so clearly - Wharton's descriptions in Ethan Frome were perfect! Also loved the references to things like "the L" in New England architecture (my parents have one of these) and oilcloth rugs (also featured in my childhood home). The story was slow but compelling and overall I liked it. That said, I thought the last paragraph was harsh and lacking in empathy, especially the bit about the women having to hold their tongues.
• 
  Lexi Harder

  I read this independently in high school during a bout of depression and, well, my take on this book is testament to the fact that the time in which you read a book definitely colors how much you like it. To catatonic 16 year old me, I needed the kick in the pants that these even sadder new englanders gave me. The ironic ending made me laugh. Ethan! You're only 28! Cheer up!
• 
  Máire

  I cannot believe this book is as well liked as it is. UGH.
  There isn't a single thing I like about this book.
  
  
  Who the hell would think sledding into a tree would kill you?!
  
  
  Edith Wharton, your writing is flowery, but your plots and actual story telling skills are severely lacking.
  
  I'd give this 0 stars if I could.
• 
  Fredrick Rege

  Edith Wharton's literary style stands the test of time. Her works are still easy to read, fun to read, and at the end of the day, a good read.
  
  Modern readers may be set back by this story's ending, but it's the definition of 'surprising but inevitable.'
• 
  Craig Wilcox

  I only read Ethan Frome, which had made an impression on me in high school. It is a good story and I’m glad to have revisited it after all these years.
  The other stories were of no interest and I returned the book.
• 
  Dana

  Beautifully written, and I would have rated it 5 stars for that alone but the plot was too uncomfortable for me. It shows the tragedy that marriage can entail but on the positive I guess it shows the tragedy that comes from not honoring it as well.
• 
  Dawn

  Ethan Frome - five stars
  The Touchstone -- two stars
  The Last Asset -- three stars
  Xingu -- two stars
  The Other Two -- three stars
• 
  Brandon O'Neill

  Ethan Frome itself would get 5 stars from me. One of my favorite stories of all time. The other 4 stories here were OK - very different in tone and depth. Nothing great.