Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton: Free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB Download
Ethan Frome
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The story begins
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-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.
The frame story breaks off here. The rest of the novel — the dance, the evening with the pickle-dish, the ride down the Corbury road — continues in the free EPUB below.
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~35,000 words (estimated)
Approx. 1.9 hours
Standalone
Starkfield, a hill farm in western Massachusetts
Chapter summaries
EPUB · AZW3 · KEPUB
0.35 MB (EPUB) · 0.41 MB (AZW3) · 0.36 MB (KEPUB)
Public domain in the United States
Project Gutenberg
Ethan Frome is Edith Wharton’s short, cold novel of a New England hill farm: a man of twenty-eight, tied to a wife seven years older and permanently ailing, falls in love with the young cousin who came to keep house for them and has nowhere else to go. Wharton tells it as a frame story. An engineer stranded in Starkfield for a winter sees the ruined man at the post-office and pieces the past together out of village talk, so that we know the accident before the story begins. Its centre is one evening in a kitchen, with a cat in a rocking-chair, a smashed pickle-dish and two people who cannot say what they mean.
The book appeared in 1911, when Wharton was forty-nine and already the author of The House of Mirth; it is her only sustained study of the rural poor, and her severest book: the famous sled ride is not a romantic gesture but a half-negotiated attempt at death, and the twenty-four years that follow are the punishment. Ethan Frome is short enough to read in an evening and bleak enough to stay. This page offers the complete novel as a free epub, with summary and analysis below. The text is available via Project Gutenberg #4517.
Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton: Summary, Characters & Themes
Ethan Frome is a summary and analysis of Edith Wharton’s 1911 novel, published in New York by Charles Scribner’s Sons after serialisation in Scribner’s Magazine. It is a short book, not much over a hundred pages, and it runs against the grain of its author’s other work: no drawing room, no fortune to lose, no Europe. There is a mortgaged farm, a saw-mill that does not pay, and three people who cannot get out. Wharton knew the country, having built The Mount at Lenox, but she wrote as a visitor, and her narrator is a stranger too.
The structure is a frame. An engineer, in Starkfield for a winter to work on the power-house at Corbury Junction, is held there by a carpenters’ strike and becomes curious about the lame, scarred man who drives him to the station. From Harmon Gow, from his landlady Mrs. Ned Hale, and from one night snowed in at the farm, he assembles the story: “I had the story, bit by bit, from various people.” The past then takes over: we are told there was a smash-up twenty-four years ago, then made to watch the winter that produced it.
That winter belongs to Mattie Silver, Zeena’s cousin, orphaned and penniless, taken in as an unpaid housekeeper. Ethan walks her home from the church dances, teaches her the constellations, and slowly understands that the only happiness in his life is a girl he cannot afford to keep and cannot bear to lose. Zeena, thirty-five and genuinely ill, comes back from Bettsbridge with a diagnosis of “complications”, a hired girl engaged for a dollar extra, and the decision that Mattie must go. The rest is that decision worked out over two days: a broken wedding present, an abandoned letter, a drive by way of Shadow Pond, and a last run past the big elm.
The ending refuses every consolation the nineteenth century had taught readers to expect. Ethan and Mattie do not run away, do not die and are not forgiven; they are carried back into the house, and Mattie, her spine broken, spends twenty-four years in a chair while Zeena, whose illness had looked like a fraud, nurses them both. Mrs. Hale has the last word: if Mattie had died, Ethan might have lived, and between the Fromes up at the farm and the Fromes down in the graveyard there is not much difference, except that the dead are quiet.
Ethan Frome made Wharton’s reputation as something more than a satirist of New York, and it has stayed in print for more than a century. Born in New York in 1862, she had published The House of Mirth in 1905 and would publish The Age of Innocence in 1920, winning the Pulitzer Prize; she was divorced in 1913 and lived the rest of her life in France. The Berkshire landscape of the novel is still there. For the author’s life and other work, see Edith Wharton. The full text is available from Project Gutenberg #4517.
Historical Context
Starkfield is invented; the country around it is not. In 1911 the hill farms of western Massachusetts were in long decline: the railroad had gone through the valley towns and left the back roads to themselves, the young people had left for the mills or the West, and the land was worked by ageing families who could not sell and could not go. A man there might own three hundred acres and no money, and “complications” was both a diagnosis and a social rank.
The novel takes the regional material of Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman seriously and refuses the dialect humour, and it takes naturalism seriously and refuses the theory: nothing here is fated in the abstract, everything is caused by a specific sum of money that is not there. Reviewers called the book Greek, which was a way of saying it was unbearably plain.
It appeared in the year Wharton’s own marriage was breaking down (she was divorced in 1913), and its portrait of a marriage that cannot be ended has always been read in that light, though she denied it. It never went out of print, and was adapted for the stage, for radio and, in 1993, for a film with Liam Neeson and Patricia Arquette.
Key Characters & Literary Archetypes
- Ethan Frome: Twenty-eight when the past begins, fifty-two when the narrator meets him. He gave up a year’s course at a technological college at Worcester to nurse a father who had gone soft in the brain, stayed for his mother, and married the woman who nursed her. Proud, strong and without money.
- Zeena Frome: Born Zenobia Pierce, seven years older than her husband — thirty-five to his twenty-eight — ill in a way the village discusses and the doctors cannot fix. Her silences fill the house and her illnesses give her authority; she is not a villain, and the novel will not let us make her one.
- Mattie Silver: Zeena’s cousin, an orphan of about twenty-one, brought from Stamford with fifty dollars and no home. Pretty, warm, light-footed at the dances and hopeless at housework; the red ribbon and the pickle-dish are hers. She is the only one who says what she wants.
- The narrator, Harmon Gow and Mrs. Ned Hale: The engineer who frames the story is a visitor with no claim on it, and says so. Gow supplies the village facts at the post-office; Mrs. Hale, born Ruth Varnum, supplies the pity and the last word. Their testimony is all the evidence the novel offers.
Core Literary Themes
- Poverty as plot: Every turn is decided by money: the fifty dollars Andrew Hale will not advance, the dollar a week for a hired girl, the price of two fares west, the mortgage that makes the farm unsellable. Arithmetic does the work of fate.
- Silence and inarticulacy: Ethan and Mattie cannot say what they feel. Their happiest scene is made of things not said, the declaration is a letter torn up, and the only proposal is made at the top of a hill in nine words.
- Winter and landscape: Snow, thaw, the big elm at the bend, the graveyard where the Fromes lie, the railroad that took the traffic away: the landscape is a set of physical facts that limit what people can do. The sled ride is the most literal case of a hill doing the work of destiny.
- Duty and the right to leave: Wharton asks whether a man may abandon a wife he no longer loves, and gives no comfortable answer. Ethan’s plan to go west collapses because he cannot pay for it. Duty survives the death of love, and then outlives the people who keep it.
Why Download Our Custom E-Reader Edition of Ethan Frome?
This is the complete novel, not an excerpt or a study guide: the frame story in Starkfield, all nine chapters of that winter, and the return to the kitchen twenty-four years later, in the order Wharton published them. The text is the Project Gutenberg transcription, checked and reset, so the Berkshire speech of Jotham Powell and the long quiet paragraphs of the sled ride arrive intact.
It is built for e-readers rather than for scans: real paragraphs, no page images, no broken hyphenation, working navigation and a cover made for a modern shelf. The whole book fits in a file smaller than a photograph.
It is short. At roughly thirty-five thousand words it is a two-hour read, which makes it the rare canonical American novel you can finish on a train and argue about at the other end.
- Project Gutenberg transcription, via Project Gutenberg #4517 — the source text used for this edition.
- Complete 1911 text All nine chapters and the frame narrative, unabridged, with the original chapter divisions and no modernisation.
- EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB One file for every reader: Apple Books and Kobo take the EPUB or KEPUB, Kindles take the AZW3.
- Summary and analysis Movements, characters, themes and historical context on this page, if you want the reading before the story.
- The Yellow Wallpaper — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- The Turn of the Screw — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- The Legend of Sleepy Hollow — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
Chapter summaries
The novel is short: nine chapters inside a frame. This guide follows its eight movements, from the engineer’s arrival to the kitchen he leaves twenty-four years later.
- Prologue: Starkfield: An engineer comes up for a job at the Corbury Junction power-house and is held in Starkfield all winter by a carpenters’ strike. At the post-office he sees a tall, grey, lame man with a red scar on his forehead, and learns from Harmon Gow that Ethan Frome has been in Starkfield too many winters: the smart ones get away. Snowed in at the farm, he hears a woman’s voice droning behind the kitchen door: “It was that night that I found the clue to Ethan Frome.”
- Chapters I-II: the dance: Winter, twenty-four years earlier. Ethan, twenty-eight, watches the dance end from the church steps while Mattie Silver whirls through a Virginia reel with Denis Eady. He walks her home past the big elm where Ned Hale and Ruth Varnum nearly killed themselves, and at the gate by the Frome gravestones thinks that some day she will lie there beside him. The key is not under the mat: Zeena is waiting up in her wrapper, and her first words are about the snow he has tracked in.
- Chapters III-IV: the evening alone: Zeena goes to Bettsbridge to see a new doctor about her shooting pains. Ethan drives to the village for glue and asks Andrew Hale for a fifty-dollar advance on his lumber; Hale, building a house for Ned and Ruth, cannot give it. He comes home to a locked door and a table laid with doughnuts and his favourite pickles. The cat jumps into Zeena’s empty chair, their hands meet over the milk-jug, and the cat backs into the pickle-dish and smashes it. Ethan props the pieces edge to edge, meaning to glue them.
- Chapter V: the sewing: Mattie sits in Zeena’s rocking-chair, then remembers herself and moves back to the lamp. Ethan asks whether she would be afraid to go down the Corbury road with him on such a night, and mentions clumsily that he has seen “a friend of yours getting kissed”. Mattie blushes, guesses it was Ruth and Ned, and asks whether Zeena has anything against her. He kisses the end of her sewing, she rolls it up, and he says good night without touching her hand.
- Chapters VI-VII: complications: The thaw comes and the glue is never bought; the store is shut by the time Ethan reaches the village. He comes home to find Zeena already back, sitting bolt upright in her travelling dress in the dark. She has “complications”, she says, and Dr. Buck says she must have a hired girl; one is engaged for a dollar extra and comes tomorrow, and Mattie will not be needed. It is the first open quarrel of their seven years, and Ethan loses it.
- Chapter VIII: the night in the study: Ethan goes down to his cold study with his books and the box-sofa Zeena made him when they were engaged. Mattie has left a note on the back of a seed catalogue: “Don’t trouble, Ethan.” He begins a letter announcing that he is going west, then reads the fare table in the Bettsbridge Eagle and understands that he cannot pay for two tickets, has no security left to borrow against, and cannot leave Zeena a mortgaged farm she cannot work. It is the night he was to have taken Mattie coasting.
- Chapter IX: Shadow Pond and the coast: Ethan drives Mattie to the five o’clock train, but turns up the Bettsbridge road instead: “Are you going round by Shadow Pond?” At the pond where they sat at the picnic he reminds her that this is where he found her gold locket. She says she has thought of going away with him since the first summer; he confesses that he is tied hand and foot. She finds his abandoned letter in her dress and tears it into the snow. Then, at the top of the Corbury road, she asks him to take her down again, right into the big elm, so that they never have to come up any more. He fights it, agrees, sees his wife’s face between him and the tree, brushes at it, rights the sled, and strikes the elm.
- Epilogue: the kitchen: Ethan wakes in the snow with a weight on his back that turns out to be Mattie. She lives, with her spine broken, and Zeena, who had seemed to be malingering, takes them both home and nurses them for twenty-four years. The narrator finds two grey women by the stove, one complaining, one silent, and cannot tell which is his hostess. Mrs. Hale says she once told the minister it was a pity Mattie lived, and that between the Fromes up at the farm and the Fromes down in the graveyard there is little to choose.
Ethan Frome: Frequently Asked Questions
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Part of: Classic Books by Length and Reading Time · Authors
