OMG.  Poor Ethan Frome and Mattie Silver. And has there ever been a more hateful character in literature than Zenobia Frome?

I’ve now read this outstanding novel by Edith Wharton, the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in Fiction in 1921, at least ten times, and I never tire of the beautiful descriptions of a New England winter and the tension of the Frome house in which the sickened (and sickening) Zeena ruins the lives of her good husband, Ethan, and her cousin, Mattie sent to be her household helper when her family’s fortunes go south.

Set in the fictitous Starkfield, Massachusetts early in the 20th C, Wharton paints a picture of a quiet town probably in the hill towns west of Worcester.  Life is hard work and lean, but as the novel begins, Ethan is a bright and hard working young man married to Zeena, a thin, bitter, hypochondriacal woman whom he married seven years earlier after she cared for his mother who was suffering from dementia.  When both his parents had died, in a desparate attempt to avoid the depression and emptiness of an empty, isolated house, Ethan married Zeena and they co-existed without love or even friendship until Zeena’s cousin, Mattie entered their lives, a merry and lively young woman,  As Ethan slowly fell in love and Zeena slowly grew to hate her, Mattie’s time in Starkfield was doomed to end.  What Wharton did, however, was to turn this domestic household battle into an existential struggle between duty and love, depression and passion.  The ending, despite my having read it so many times, still filled me with terror and then sadness.

I already look forward to reading “Ethan Frome” again next winter.  I think a part of me is always hoping that Ethan and Mattie get away and live happily ever after somewhere out West while Zeena continues to shrivel and shrink in her bitterness and spite.  There’s always a chance it will end differently in fiction.

Wharton was a true phenomenon, writing best sellers at a time when women were most often seen but not heard, let alone read.  Her books still read vividly after a century as does her design and garden work.  She herself led an unconventional life which can be viewed at her Berkshire home, The Mount, beautifully preserved in Lenox, MA.