Showalter Elaine - Ethan Frome

OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

ETHAN FROME

EDITH NEWBOLD (JONES) WHARTON (18621937) was born in New York, of wealthy and socially prominent parents. She spent much of her childhood in Europe, and although she had little formal education, developed an early taste for the arts. In 1885 she married Edward Robbins Wharton, a Harvard graduate and banker thirteen years her senior; the marriage was never happy, and they divorced in 1913. After several years of relative idleness and depression, Wharton turned to writing; her first book, The Decoration of Houses (1897), was based on her remodelling of The Mount, her newly purchased country residence in Lenox, Massachusetts. Wharton achieved critical renown with the publication of The House of Mirth in 1905. She moved to France in 1907, where she became part of a cosmopolitan society of writers and intellectuals. Wharton published more than forty books, and became best known for her novels of New York society and fashionable Americans abroad, including The Custom of the Country (1913) and The Age of Innocence (1920), for which she received the Pulitzer Prize. She was decorated by the French and Belgian governments for her contributions to war-relief, and received an honorary degree from Yale in 1923, her last trip to the United States. Wharton died of a stroke at Pavillon Colombe, her house in the Paris suburb of Saint-Brice-sous-Fort, leaving an unfinished novel, The Buccaneers. She is buried at the Cimetire des Gonards at Versailles.

ELAINE SHOWALTER is Avalon Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University, and the author of A Literature of Their Own and Sisters Choice: Tradition and Change in American Womens Writing. A frequent contributor of reviews and essays for the Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books, she is currently working on a book about feminist intellectuals.

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OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

EDITH WHARTON

Translated with an Introduction and Notes by
ELAINE SHOWALTER

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP

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Editorial material Elaine Showalter 1996

First published as a Worlds Classics paperback 1996
Reissued as an Oxford Worlds Classics paperback 1998
Reissued 2008

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Wharton, Edith, 18621937.
Ethan Frome / Edith Wharton; edited with an introduction by
Elaine Showalter.
(The Worlds classics)
Includes bibliographical references (p. cm.).
1. Married peopleNew EnglandFiction. 2. Rural poorNew
EnglandFiction. 3. Farm lifeNew EnglandFiction. 4. New
EnglandSocial life and customsFiction. I. Showalter, Elaine.
II. Series.

PS3545.H16E7 1996 813.52dc20 9552206

ISBN 978-0199538096

Printed in Great Britain by
Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

Readers who do not wish to know the plot may prefer to treat the introduction as an epilogue.

OF all of Edith Whartons books, Ethan Frome (1911) is probably the best-known in the United States. Generations of American readers have studied Ethan Frome as a set text in secondary school, less recommended, I suspect, for its artistic brilliance than for its brevity and absence of explicit sexual references. Ironically, however, this classic example of American female Gothic is a twisted tale of sexual hysteria and thwarted adultery, perhaps the darkest novel Wharton ever wrote. Moreover, despite its apparent stylistic simplicity, Ethan Frome is a complex frame narrative, and Wharton herself regarded it as a turning-point in her evolving mastery as a novelist. In her memoir, A Backward Glance (1934), she credited the composition of the novel with her first awareness of the artisans full control of his implements,

Only in recent years have new biographical data on Wharton, including the publication of her letters, and new critical perspectives on Whartons affinities with American womens writing at the turn of the century, come together to illuminate the special intimacy between Wharton and Ethan Frome. Wharton herself was particularly stung by reviewers who accused her of unfamiliarity with both the region in which Ethan Frome is set, and the class background of its characters. In 1922 she agreed to write a preface for a new edition defending both her background and her narrative technique; as she explained to her publishers Scribners, I am rather fond of Ethan Frome, and I should not care to have it spoken of by any one who does not understand what I was trying to do. became for her imagination what Flintcomb Ash was to Hardy, or the Yorkshire moors to the Bronts, a primal landscape which exposed the harsh face of human existence.

Even in her time, Wharton recalled in her memoir