Ethan Frome: Edith Wharton

The Penguin English Library Edition of Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

`He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of its frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface`

Ethan Frome works his unproductive farm and struggles to maintain a bearable existence with his difficult, suspicious and hypochondriac wife, Zeena. But when Zeena`s vivacious cousin enters their household as a `hired girl`, Ethan finds himself obsessed with her and with the possibilities for happiness she comes to represent. In one of American fiction`s finest and most intense narratives, Edith Wharton moves this ill-starred trio towards their tragic destinies.

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