Ethan Frome

Ethan Frome is a novella by New York City-born author Edith Wharton. It was first published in 1911, when Wharton was about 49 years old. As a writer, Wharton was very prolific, constantly producing and publishing shorts stories, poems, novels, novellas, and essays. Check out this timeline that lists her publishing history. Wharton won a Pulitzer Prize for he society novel The Age of Innocence in 1921, making her the first woman ever awarded one. She was also the first woman to be given an honorary doctorate by Yale University.

Ethan Frome is one of Wharton's most famous stories, in part because of its extremely raw portrait of the poverty stricken residents of the fictional town of Starkfield, Massachusetts. Take that and throw in a creepy love triangle, and a whole lot of broken dreams. Anyone who has ever wanted to escape to a better life will be able to relate to this story.

Also – just so you know – Wharton probably didn't pull this love triangle business out of her hat. Before her divorce from the physically and mentally ailing Teddy Wharton, and before the publication of Ethan Frome, Edith had an affair with Morton Fullerton, a journalist for The London Times (source).

You might never read another book quite like this one. Edith Wharton performed a boldly original literary experiment when she wrote Ethan Frome. This novella is unusual, from voice to punctuation to structure to the story itself. But once you get into it you will find yourself captured – like the characters – between Starkfield's natural beauty and its serious creepiness.

Love triangles are nothing new, but Wharton presents this timeless topic with an eerie twist in Ethan Frome. Think Steven King's Pet Sematary (where things come back from the dead altered, yet gruesomely recognizable) meets Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (where characters are marked physically by their infidelities).

So we challenge you: give Ethan Frome a chance and then tell us if you've ever read a love story like this before.