Ethan Frome | Ethan Frome

At a glance:

Author: Edith Newbold Jones
First Published: 1911
Type of Work: Novella
Type of Plot: Tragedy
Time of Work: The early 1900’s
Setting: Starkfield, a fictional New England village
Principal Characters: Ethan Frome, Zenobia (Zeena) Frome, Mattie Silver, The narrator, Mrs. Hale (Ruth Varnum)
Genres: Long fiction, Domestic realism, Frame story
Subjects: Love or romance, Suicide, Nineteenth century, Marriage, Villages, New England, Poverty or poor people, Jealousy, envy, or resentment, Farms, farmers, or farming, Adultery, Accidents, Sick persons, Fate or fatalism, Happiness, Sleds or sledding
Locales: New England, Starkfield, MA

Ethan Frome is unique among Edith Wharton’s works in that it tells the tale of an isolated drama, far from the urban and societal concerns of her longer novels. It is also distinctive in that it is a “framework story,” that is, a story within a story. Wharton’s “frame” takes the form of a narrator who introduces the end of the story (Ethan is seen in the present, at age fifty-two) and then provides a “vision” of prior events that becomes the story proper. Although some framework stories never return to the frame, such as Henry James’s...

Ethan Frome | Ethan Frome

At a glance:

Form and Content

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