Ethan Frome

Edith Wharton set herself a stylistic exercise and produced the least forgiving book of her career. In the grip of a merciless New England winter, a silent farmer is bound to a querulous, ailing wife who rules from her chair - and to the young cousin who has come to keep house for them. Framed as a story pieced together by a stranger years afterward, the novel tells us from its first pages that so...