Ethan Frome

Ethan Frome works his unproductive farm and struggles to maintain a bearable existence with his difficult, suspicious, and hypochondriac wife, Zeenie. But when Zeenie’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 toward their tragic destinies. Different in both tone and theme from Wharton’s other works, Ethan Frome has become perhaps her most enduring and most widely read novel.

Edith Wharton (1862-û1937) was born in New York but made her home in France. In 1915 the French government gave her the cross of the Legion of Honor for her generous guidance and charity during the First World War. She published more than forty works in her lifetime, including The House of Mirth.
Elizabeth Ammons is professor of English and American studies at Tufts University. She edited the Penguin Classics edition of Wharton-'s Summer.