Free to read
Ethan Frome
Edith Wharton
In a snowbound New England town, Ethan Frome's quiet life is caught between duty and longing. A visitor pieces together the choices behind a household's lasting silence.
- Language
- English
- Genre
- Literary fiction / Tragedy
- Length
- 10 chapters · About 3 hours
- First published
- 1911
- Availability
- Free
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Is this book for you?
A brief, emotionally intense novel for readers who value atmosphere and restraint. Wintry imagery and carefully placed details reward a slower pace.
Read it in English. This edition is free to add to your library.
Text source: Project Gutenberg. Source license and territorial terms.
THE OPENING PAGES
Try the first few lines.
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-backed 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 not more than fifty-two. I had this from Harmon Gow, who had driven the stage from Bettsbridge to Starkfield in pre-trolley days and knew the chronicle of all the families on his line.
“He’s looked that way ever since he had his smash-up; and that’s twenty-four years ago come next February,”…Start reading this book ↗