She had suffered a breakdown, as had her husband, Teddy. Wharton felt trapped in her marriage, Goldsmith said. “There’s a struggle for dominance in this claustrophobic impoverished New England farmhouse where the two women and man sit all day, struggling against each other,” Prordrescher said.
She sees the affection and love that is blossoming between Ethan and Mattie, a young girl who is sent to live with them who has nowhere else to go. Though Ethan’s wife, Zeena, is essentially the villan of the story, she is also a little sympathetic, Page said. “Money is involved in this novel all the time,” Pfordrescher said. Her family came from the family from whom the term “keeping up with the Joneses” was coined, Goldsmith said. Wharton was very wealthy – one of the wealthiest women in New York in the mid-19th century.
Wharton wanted to reverse the stereotypes of New Englanders that other writers had been perpetuating, which were a creation of a kinder, gentler, sanitized New England. She heard a story of a sledding accident in which one woman was killed and two others were severely injured, and she decided to use it as a germ for this novel, Goldsmith said. When living in Lenox, she found this story. But while living in New England, Wharton observed a lot of poverty. Her first novels, like “The House Of Mirth,” are novels of “manners” and New York high society, said Goldsmith. Today, Edith Wharton’s haunting tale of forbidden romance in a rural New England town is her most widely-read novel. Critics called the story cruel and violent and sales of the novel were dismal. When Edith Wharton’s novel “Ethan Frome” was first published in 1911, reviews were largely negative.
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