Ethan Frome (Annotated)

Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome is a spare, wintry tragedy of thwarted desire, moral paralysis, and rural deprivation in the fictional New England village of Starkfield. Framed through the observations of an unnamed narrator, the novella gradually uncovers Ethan's unhappy marriage to the hypochondriacal Zeena and his doomed attachment to her young cousin, Mattie Silver. Its compressed structure, auste...