Stranded one winter in the bleak Massachusetts village of Starkfield, an engineer pieces together the story of Ethan Frome - a poor, taciturn farmer, prematurely aged and lamed by an old "smash-up." Years earlier, the young Ethan, trapped in a loveless marriage to his sickly, querulous wife Zeena, falls quietly and deeply in love with Mattie Silver, the penniless young cousin who comes to keep their house. When Zeena moves to send Mattie away, the two are driven toward a desperate act whose consequences bind them all for life. Spare, austere, and tragic, Wharton's most famous novella turns her unsparing moral precision from gilded New York to the crushing poverty and silence of rural New England.
