He also notices other features on Frome’s face, features that indicate a hard life lived, but with meager explanations provided by Gow, the aura of mystery around Frome only deepens. There was something bleak and unapproachable in his face, and he was so stiffened and grizzled that I took him for an old man and was surprised to hear that he was not more than fifty-two. It was not so much his great height that marked him, for the “natives” were easily singled out by their lank longitude from the stockier foreign breed: it was the careless powerful look he had, in spite of a lameness checking each step like a jerk of chain. Even then he was the most striking figure in Starkfield, though he was but the ruin of a man. It was there that, several years ago, I saw him (Frome) for the first time and the sight pulled me up sharp.

On his way to the post office driven by Harmon Gow, his glance falls upon the pitiable, weighed down profile of Ethan Frome for the first time… Our narrator is a young man, visiting Starkfield for a short period on some urgent business. When the book opens, we are in Starkfield, Massachusetts a bleak, remote town characterized by winters so bitterly cold that they only accentuate a person’s sense of loneliness and isolation. But this post focuses on Ethan Frome and Summer, two novellas that boast of the same emotional depth and intensity as her New York novels and stories.Įthan Frome is a brilliant, dark, wintry tale of doomed love set in a remote New England town, a starkly different setting from Wharton’s classic, old New York. Her best novel in my view – The Age of Innocence – I had read pre-blog, and one I hope to reread and review in the near future. Edith Wharton is one of my favourite authors as can be gauged from the number of books I have reviewed on this blog – The Custom of the Country, The House of Mirth, Old New York, and The New York Stories.

Edith wharton novel frome