Ethan Frome

Ethan Frome is a novella by the American writer Edith Wharton, published in 1911. It is set in rural Massachusetts and is one of the books that established her reputation as a novelist of New England life.

The book is told as a frame story. A nameless engineer arrives in the fictional town of Starkfield to work for a power company, and the carpenter's strike keeps him there for a winter. He is driven to and from the plant by Ethan Frome, a quiet, lame local man who has lived in the town all his life and whose injury is part of the story everyone knows and nobody tells. The main narrative then moves back twenty-four years to the farm where Frome lives with Zenobia, a wife who is older than she looks and whose illnesses require expensive treatment, and where Zeena's cousin Mattie arrives to help with the household because her own family cannot keep her. Frome falls in love with Mattie, and the poverty of the household makes every choice about their situation both small and irreversible.

Wharton writes the winter of the book as a physical presence, and the story is built around the limited options available to people with no money in a small, watchful community.