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    Ethan Frome
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    Ethan Frome
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    Ethan Frome
    Audiobook (abridged)3 hours

    Ethan Frome

    Written by Edith Wharton

    Narrated by Nathan Osgood

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    Penguin Classics presents Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome, adapted for audio and available as a digital download as part of the Penguin English Library series. Read by Nathan Osgood.

    '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.

    Part of a series of vintage recordings taken from the Penguin Archives. Affordable, collectable, quality productions - perfect for on-the-go listening.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin UK Audio
    Release dateOct 25, 2012
    ISBN9780718198664
    Author

    Edith Wharton

    Edith Wharton (1862–1937) was an American novelist—the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Age of Innocence in 1921—as well as a short story writer, playwright, designer, reporter, and poet. Her other works include Ethan Frome, The House of Mirth, and Roman Fever and Other Stories. Born into one of New York’s elite families, she drew upon her knowledge of upper-class aristocracy to realistically portray the lives and morals of the Gilded Age.

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    Reviews for Ethan Frome

    4/5

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    • 4/5
      A great example of how writing can create atmosphere without directly naming the emotions present.

      Because the book takes place in winter, I recommend reading it in that season.
    • 5/5
      How sad and tragic can one book be? So much so that you think about it for days and days.

      This is also a member of the “finish it and then pick it up again and start at the beginning” book group. It is like the pain that feels good.

      Tragic Ethan Frome; he marries his cousin Zeena just because she is there. I did not like Zeena. She was much too whiny and a dead-weight on the marriage. Zeena eventually developed a strong case of hypochondria, and needed the help of an aide to get along day-to-day. What was interesting was how she made this switch to dependency so rapidly after marrying Ethan. This is where Mattie, Zeena's cousin, comes in. Mattie comes to live with Ethan and Zeena to help out around the house.

      Mattie is a breath of fresh air in Ethan’s life. She is young, innocent and attractive, and of course, very much off limits. She has a complicated past and not a lot of options. Slowly Ethan becomes infatuated and then in love with her.

      Wharton beautifully lets you live their love and difficult decisions. I am not sure if Ethan is really as trapped as he feels himself to be. Wharton explores this through the story and allows each to decide. Was the love of Ethan and Mattie doomed or were there other options there? The story is dark and cold, just like the winter in the Massachusetts town where they live.

      The ending is very Twilight Zonish. The most impossible and long-lasting punishment I have ever read.
    • 5/5
      I don't think I'll be forgetting this book anytime soon- or ever.
    • 4/5
      Short but beautifully-written: a perfect miniature portrait of the claustrophobic natures of the harsh winters of small communities in North America in the mid-nineteenth century, of poverty and of a loveless relationship.
    • 4/5
      So depressing! Yikes! Still a fascinating read, though.
    • 1/5
      Dreadful and boring.
    • 4/5
      My favorite of Edith Wharton's novels are those set in the center of the New York Society of the "Gilded Age". By contrast Ethan Frome is set in the fictional New England town of Starkfield, where an unnamed narrator tells the story of his encounter with Ethan Frome, a man with dreams and desires that end in an ironic turn of events. The narrator tells the story based on an account from observations at Frome's house when he had to stay there during a winter storm.The novel is framed by an extended flashback. The first chapter opens with an unnamed narrator spending a winter in Starkfield. He attempts to learn about the life of a mysterious local figure named Ethan Frome, a man who had been injured in a horrific “smash-up” twenty-four years before. Frome is described as “the most striking figure in Starkfield”, “the ruin of a man” with a “careless powerful look…in spite of a lameness checking each step like the jerk of a chain”. Throughout the novel Ethan Frome makes ample use of symbolism as a literary device. Reminiscent of The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (also set in New England), Edith Wharton uses the color red against the snowy white background of her Massachusetts setting to symbolize Ethan's cousin Mattie’s attraction and vitality as opposed to his wife Zeena, as well as her temptation to Ethan in general. Wharton uses the cat and the pickle dish to symbolize the failing marriage of Ethan and Zeena; the cat symbolizes Zeena’s presence when Ethan and Mattie are alone, and when it breaks the pickle dish, this symbolizes the final fracturing of the marriage that is rapidly coming as Mattie and Ethan slide closer and closer to adultery.The story is tragic and very dark in character. Yet Wharton's prose style makes it worth every moment spent reading about Ethan Frome.
    • 5/5
      I don't know how Wharton packed so much emotion in 103 pages. While reading it I felt the cold of the severe winters, the quiet of the countryside and the anguish of Ethan Frome. A sad, sad story about people who got together who shouldn't have and how some families just can't get out of a rut.Great read - 5 stars.
    • 5/5
      A short but powerful story. Wharton is a master of soft-footed suspense. Her tales are delicate, and her language is gentile, so it is always a gut-wrenching surprise at the end when a powerful, life-suspending event occurs. I don't read Wharton to feel happy, but I do read her to feel elevated and immersed in my senses as her stories unfold. This particular story has three strong but broken characters. Told in flashback after learning early that some tragic, body-mangling event has occurred in the past, I was compelled to keep reading because I so wanted these characters to have some moments of wholeness and grace. Those moments exist, but through a glass dimly. I can only hope that some easing of heavy burdens happens for Ethan and his two women in some unwritten future.
    • 5/5
      I often shy away from the classics because of their length. It’s quite daunting to read something with very old language at great length. Many of them are so long because they told in parts in periodicals, the more parts, the more funds for the author. My favorite quote about long books comes from Kurt Vonnegut in the introduction of his short story collection Bagombo Snuff Box: ““Reading a novel, War and Peace for example, is no Catnap. Because a novel is so long, reading one is like being married forever to somebody nobody knows or cares about.” As a result, I skipped over Ethan Frome often. I put the book on the list when I added some of the 1001 Books to Read Before You Die on my list. I picked it up and was surprised by how much I really loved it. Wharton is a master at quiet storytelling, how the characters and the landscape tell the same story. The character’s desperation is palpable, but oh so quiet like a snowy winter evening, all sounds muffled. Something ominous hangs in the air, it slowly builds, and at the last moment, the big reveal. It’s no wonder she was a master at ghost stories. A young woman in Starkfield on business, sees Ethan Frome, and with it the story of life in a small town and the desperation to get out of it. Ever burdened with his parents poor health and then his wife, he sees life in a young Mattie, his wife Zeena’s cousin. For a year he has an unhealthy fixation on her that represents the yearning for something new, to get out of the small town, to make a fresh start. As time wears on, Zeena begins to suspect something and the action of all three lead to a terrifying reality. This would be a great book for a discussion. It’s short with such strong symbolism of the town, the weather, the characters and their actions. It ends like a ghost story, something you definitely wouldn’t expect. Favorite passages:Guess he's been in Starkfield too many winters. 18He 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; but there was nothing unfriendly in his silence. I simply felt that he lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I had the sense that his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight, tragic as I guessed that to be, but had in it, as Harmon Gow had hinted, the profound accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters. P. 22His father's death, and the misfortunes following it, had put a premature end to Ethan's studies; but though they had not gone far enough to be of much practical use they had fed his fancy and made him aware of huge cloudy meanings behind the daily face of things. P.30But hitherto the emotion had remained in him as a silent ache, veiling with sadness the beauty that evoked it. He did not even know whether any one else in the world felt as he did, or whether he was the sole victim of this mournful privilege. Then he learned that one other spirit had trembled with the same touch of wonder... P.33For years that quiet company had mocked his restlessness, his desire for change and freedom. "We never got away-how should you?" seemed to be written on every headstone; and whenever he went in or out of his gate he thought with a shiver: "I shall just go on living here till I join them." But now all desire for change had vanished, and the sight of the little enclosure gave him a warm sense of continuance and stability. P.44All the long misery of his baffled past, of his youth of failure, hardship and vain effort, rose up in his soul in bitterness and seemed to take shape before him in the woman who at every turn had barred his way. She had taken everything else from him; and now she meant to take the one thing that made up for all the others. P.85For the life of her smile, the warmth of her voice, only cold paper and dead words! P. 92Confused motions of rebellion stormed in him. He was too young, too strong, too full of the sap of living, to submit so easily to the destruction of his hopes. Must he wear out all his years at the side of a bitter querulous woman? Other possibilities had been in him, possibilities sacrificed, one by one, to Zeena's narrow-mindedness and ignorance. And what good had come of it? She was a hundred times bitterer and more discontented than when he had married her: the one pleasure left her was to inflict pain on him. All the healthy instincts of self-defence rose up in him against such waste... P. 93The inexorable facts closed in on him like prison-warders handcuffing a convict. There was no way out-none. He was a prisoner for life, and now his one ray of light was to be extinguished. P.95
    • 5/5
      How did I miss this until now? Everyone knows the name of this novel but why did I never read it? I picked it up as an audio version and was completely taken by the way Edith Wharton writes. Now I will look forward to reading some of her other works.
    • 4/5
      This was such a bleak, sad tale, that I kept wishing that Ethan could escape his loveless marriage and run off with Mattie, but there was no real happiy ending. Simplle story, beautifully written.
    • 3/5
      Not sure why this is considered one of her weaker works. I've read a couple others and this seemed to be the same-o story of failed love.Although a novella, it plodded like an old arthritic sorrel, through the hoary, biting ghostly whisps of evening snow, on an inky country road...
    • 5/5
      A farmer in turn-of-the-century New England struggles to survive and to make his farm successful. First he is tethered to the land by his helpless parents; then by his ailing wife. When Ethan's wife's alluring cousin comes to stay, she and Ethan become trapped in a hopelessly passionate love affair. Trapped by fear of public condemnation and the bonds of a loveless marriage, Ethan starts down a path which could eventually lead to tragedy for all involved.I had originally wanted to read this book after seeing the movie with Liam Neeson. Mareena and I caught the last part of the movie and were shocked at how sad it was. I love a sad book and Mareena loves the classics. I give this book an A+!
    • 3/5
      Ethan Frome is a farmer who has little money to live. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife Zeena and Zeena's cousin Mattie. Mattie is younger than Zeena, so Ethan is fascinated and love her. But he has the wife, so he faces many difficulties. I was interested in this story. I think love is so difficult and scare because Ethan fell in love with Mattie even though he had the wife.
    • 4/5
      This is another that I just read for book club. I never read any Edith Wharton in High School or College, but after visiting her home and reading this book, I feel like I missed out on a lot.
    • 5/5
      Such a sad tragic story but so wonderfully written. Read it.
    • 4/5
      A short, spare novella detailing the doomed relationship between a man and his wife’s cousin. There are plenty of reviews, so I won’t rehash any of it. What I found most compelling was Wharton’s ability to make her reader invest in a story that does little more than detail the bleak landscape of New England and the icy nature of New Englanders’ emotional existence. A total downer, but a beautifully written and evocative one. I listened to this on audio, narrated by Scott Brick, and will return to the story in printed format at some point, as I think I missed some powerful writing.
    • 4/5
      A melancholy read, with such descriptive writing that the snow on the stark fields of Starkfield glistens as you read, and the countenance of the various characters as they speak, convey their words straight to your mind's eye. The story a tragedy; the writing brilliant.
    • 4/5
      A poor rural farmer in Starkfield, Massachusetts is involved in a love triangle with a poor relation of his older, ailing wife who has come to live with them. It was a marriage which probably should have never occurred in the first place. Readers see how this affects his relationship with his wife. Wharton is a master at painting a picture with words. While I'm not convinced this story would have played out this way in real life, the author's descriptions make the book worth reading. I'm not sure that I really liked Ethan or his wife that much, but I did like Mattie. It is her story that made me sad.
    • 4/5
      "I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story. If you know Starkfield, Massachusetts, you know the post-office. If you know the post-office you must have seen Ethan Frome drive up to it, drop the reins on his hollow-back bay and drag himself across the brick pavement to the white colonnade; and you must have asked who he was. It was there that, several years ago, I saw him for the first time; and the sight pulled me up sharp. Even then he was the most striking figure in Starkfield, though he was but the ruin of a man. It was not so much his great height that marked him, for the "natives" were easily singled out by their lank longitude from the stockier foreign breed: it was the careless powerful look he had, in spite of a lameness checking each step like the jerk of a chain. There was something bleak and unapproachable in his face, and he was so stiffened and grizzled that I took him for an old man and was surprised to hear that he was no more than fifty-two."The narrator goes on to tell us the story of Ethan Frome, who had great aspirations as a young man, with hopes of having a brilliant career and moving to a big city. But first with his sick parents, and then Zenobia, the woman who helped him care for them—whom he was trapped into marrying and who then went on to become a self-pitying and difficult invalid who sought expensive cures—Ethan had little hope of escaping the ancestral home and the poverty that his doomed farm and marriage constrained him to. When Zeena's cheerful first cousin Mattie comes to the farm to help with the household chores in the heart of a bitterly cold winter, Ethan can't help but bask in her warmth. He starts dreaming of a better life again, and together they share a brief and chaste romance which, in this puritanical place, is bound to spell disaster. This is great writing by Wharton, and though the story might be glum, the characters and their opposing motivations form an unforgettable love triangle in a human drama which I found almost comical for the extreme state of hopelessness into which the protagonists are plunged, seemingly for all eternity (but that's just me). The introduction by Elizabeth Ammons in the Penguin Classics Deluxe edition, which I read after taking in the novel, goes on to explain how it drew on Wharton's personal experiences, even though based on first impressions, one might think Ethan Frome was a complete departure from her writing about the cosseted upper classes she belonged to. For example, the mysterious ailments Zenobia suffers from appear to be derived directly from the author's own struggles with depression for which Wharton sought treatment in the mid-1890s: "She suffered from nausea, weight loss, extreme fatigue, headaches, and profound despondency. At the time, the standard diagnosis for such symptoms was neurasthenia, sometimes called hysteria, and the treatment, as Wharton's contemporary Charlotte Perkins Gilman chronicled in her famous 1892 story, [The Yellow Wallpaper], was known as the rest cure. The prescribe therapy involved total bed rest, preferably in a hospital, hotel, or sanitarium, where the patient was fed, bathed, given douches and enemas, massaged, and in every other way kept dependent and completely immobile for weeks or, if necessary, months. This program of rest required removal from all exciting or upsetting stimuli such as newspapers, magazines, books, letters, visitors, or any other activity requiring mental of physical exertions, no matter how mild, including writing, sewing, and drawing. The rest cure aimed to create a healing calm so that the patient could regain mental health. For Gilman, as her short story records, it was a recipe for insanity [and no wonder!]. But for Wharton, the regimen she experienced as an outpatient had a beneficial effect. In large part she recovered because he physician, unlike Gilman's, encouraged her to pursue her writing, which she avidly did." It seems that the notion of infidelity was also drawn from personal experiences. As Wharton and her husband Teddy's unhappy marriage fell apart, each struggling with depression and with Teddy having several affairs, Edith Wharton also broke her marriage vows and "had a secret and passionate love affair with a slightly younger man, Morton Fullerton, from about 1907 to 1910. As she related it [in documents she explicitly left in a sealed packed labeled, in her own hand "For My Biographer], the affair exposed her for the first and only time in her life to intense, fulfilling, erotic passion, a realitiy that respectable late-era Victorian women such as Wharton, brought up to believe sex a necessary and unspeakable evil, where not supposed to experience. The affair ended in 1910. A year later she wrote Ethan Frome and in 1913 filed for divorce."
    • 5/5
      One of my all-time favourite novels, this beautifully written, spare tale of wasted lives and lost dreams has stayed with me for many years. The character of Ethan, an imperfect man with longings for something larger that he can sometimes glimpse, is one of the most moving in fiction.
    • 4/5
       Tragic story of wasted lives, set against a bleak New England background. A poverty-stricken New England farmer, his ailing wife and a youthful housekeeper are drawn relentlessly into a deep-rooted domestic struggle in this hauntingly grim tale of thwarted love.
    • 4/5
      Although released in 1911 this story is timeless (just as applicable in 2011 as 1911). A quick read but engrossing from the first page to the last.
    • 3/5
      I thought it was a bit contrived that it starts out at the end, then goes back to the beginning, showing how it all happened. But I understand why she constructed it that way. I bought that Ethan was in love with Mattie, but didn't feel that Wharton did her part to show why she would feel the same for him. It should have been longer, so the rest of the characters could've been more fleshed out. She barely scratches the surface of Zeena, who could have been a fascinating character. But all in all, I enjoyed it.
    • 5/5
      Ethan Frome (1911) is a lean, taut story; I love its focus and as in several of her other books, I find that Wharton knows how to end a book. There are several parallels in the book to Wharton's own life (don't read this if you don't want the end given away):- Wharton's own failing marriage .... Ethan being trapped in his.- Wharton's eventual philosophy of "owning" her own existence ..... Ethan/Mattie's decision to die instead of living unhappily, reflecting a desire to control their own fate.- Wharton's common theme of the individual being trapped by fate in her fiction ..... The failure of the suicide.Quote:On finding someone:"It was during their night walks back to the farm that he felt most intensely the sweetness of this communion. He had always been more sensitive than the people about him to the appeal of natural beauty. His unfinished studies had given form to this sensibility and even in his unhappiest moments field and sky spoke to him with a deep and powerful persuasion. But hitherto the emotion had remained in him as a silent ache, veiling with sadness the beauty that evoked it. He did not even know whether any one else in the world felt as he did, or whether he was the sole victim of this mournful privilege. Then he learned that one other spirit had trembled with the same touch of wonder..."On being trapped by fate:"They turned in at the gate and passed under the shaded knoll where, enclosed in a low fence, the Frome grave-stones slanted at crazy angles through the snow. Ethan looked at them curiously. For years that quiet company had mocked his restlessness, his desire for change and freedom. 'We never got away - how should you?' seemed to be written on every headstone, and whenever he went in or out of his gate he thought with a shiver: 'I shall just go on living here till I join them.' But now all desire for change had vanished, and the sight of the little enclosure gave him a warm sense of continuance and stability."On desire, I love the feeling of this one:"As he raised himself he suddenly felt Mattie close to him among the shadows.'Is this where Ned and Ruth kissed each other?' she whispered breathlessly, and flung her arms about him. Her lips, groping for his, swept over his face, and he held her fast in a rapture of surprise."
    • 4/5
      I loved this short story! It's without any doubt, Wharton's masterpiece!! Forget about The Age of Innocence and read this book! A great discovery!
    • 4/5
      Ethan Frome is House of Mirth made over with a male protagonist and a rural backdrop. Wharton's Starkfield (!) has become the literary epitome of wintry hardscrabble New England. Like Lily Bart, Ethan chooses freedom and happiness. He wants to pay for that choice with his death, but instead pays for it with his life.
    • 3/5
      Edith Wharton explores a love triangle not only within a small town, but within a small house. Passion ignites, burns, and dies quickly in this tale of Ethan Frome and his wife's cousin, Mattie. In the end, after a failed (intentionally?) joint-suicide attempt, Ethan, his wife Zenobia, and Mattie live together in misery.
    • 3/5
      Wow, this one sure had to be an oddity in its day. I had been looking for a love story and my friend sent me this one. I'm not entirely sure I agree with him that it's a love story, but it's hard to review this without giving the ending away. In any event, it's probably a look at what love means to some, especially in those times, e.g., themes of caring for each other, tolerating each other and depending on each other. It is a very grey and bleak book, sad, depressing and dark and a very disquieting topic for me, choosing to live a life you have absolutely no desire to live, sucking it up and making the best of it. Wharton was a wonderful writer though, the hard, cold times of rural Massachusetts are captured well and so are the inhabitants of the story, Ethan, Mattie and Zeena. I can see why many high schoolers are assigned this novella. Much fodder for discussion. Recommended, but more for the little oddity it is in that era in literature.