In the Library
Ethan Frome
Edith Wharton, 1911
- Form
- Form Novella
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 2.5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 10
- Length
- Length 35k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
Guess he's been in Starkfield too many winters. Most of the smart ones get away.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
The Age of Innocence
Edith Wharton
The Age of Innocence does the same thing, but moves the quiet devastation into Manhattan drawing rooms, watching duty crush desire just as completely.
£1.99
The Awakening
Kate Chopin
The Awakening does the same thing, but the trap is marriage itself, a woman waking too late to a life that was never going to let her go.
£1.99
Winesburg, Ohio
Sherwood Anderson
Winesburg, Ohio does the same thing, but scatters the starved and thwarted lives across a whole town instead of a single farmhouse kitchen.
£1.99
About the book
A New England farmer with a crooked spine and a grim face limps across the snow toward the Starkfield post office, and a stranger boarding nearby begins, by inches, to learn what wrecked him. Edith Wharton framed this short novel in 1911 with a narrator who arrives years after the disaster and reconstructs, from neighbours' silences and the shape of a kitchen, the night of a sledding accident. Ethan Frome is married to Zeena, who is sick. He is in love with Mattie Silver, who is twenty and not. The Massachusetts winter presses down on farm and household, and Wharton withholds nothing of how poverty and obligation starve a man inside his own life. The cold does not relent, and neither does she.