Ethan Frome

“I want to put my hand out and touch you. I want to do for you and care for you. I want to be there when youre sick and when youre lonesome.” -- Edith Wharton Ethan Frome The classic novel of despair forbidden emotions and sexual undercurrents set against the austere New England countryside. Ethan Frome works his unproductive farm and struggles to maintain a bearable existence with his difficult suspicious and hypochondriac wife Zeena. But when Zeenas 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 fictions finest and most intense narratives Edith Wharton moves this ill-starred trio toward their tragic destinies. Different in both tone and theme from Whartons other works Ethan Frome has become perhaps her most enduring and most widely read book.