Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton Background Information

Table of Contents: Part I: Biographical Sketch of Edith Wharton Part II: Historical Context—Victorian Era Part III: Realism & Naturalism as Literary Movements

Part I: Biographical Sketch of Edith Wharton Born Edith Jones into an upper-class New York City family in 1862 Privately educated by a governesses and tutors, both at home and abroad. At an early age she displayed a marked interest in writing and literature, a pursuit her socially ambitious mother attempted to discourage.

Received a marriage proposal at a young age, but her prospective in-laws ended the engagement because they felt the Jones family was too snobbish. In 1885, after another broken engagement, Edith married Edward Wharton, an older man whom the Jones family found to be of a suitably lofty social rank.

According to Claudia Roth Pierpont of The New Yorker magazine, Wharton’s marriage was “a disaster: intellectually, emotionally, and above all sexually.” She writes that “after what seems to have been one or two attempts at grappling …Teddy and Edith lived together in celibacy for twenty-eight years.” They finally divorced in 1913, when divorce became more socially acceptable. The temptations of illicit passion constitute an undeniable focus of Wharton’s fiction, and many have pointed to Wharton’s unhappy marriage as an explanation.

Wharton was advised by her doctor to take up writing fiction more seriously in order to relieve tension and stress. Wharton found temporary solace in her surreptitious affair with the journalist Morton Fullerton, which coincided with the collapse of her marriage. It was in the wake of this affair and her ensuing divorce that Wharton wrote many of her most successful and endearing works.

Wharton’s fiction was especially effective at piercing the veil of moral respectability that sometimes masked as integrity among the rich. In her fiction, conforming to social norms is constantly at odds with a rejection of conformity. She can be viewed as a critic of moral recklessness who wanted individuals to consider each moral decision on its own terms.

Wharton, who in 1924 became the first woman to receive an honorary degree from Yale University, viewed Victorian society with ironic detachment. She recorded in her writing the suffering of characters caught up in the grip of shifting economic forces and restrictive codes that often encouraged selfish behavior in the name of respectability.

Wharton’s first true critical success came with the publication of The House of Mirth in 1905. Her other novels include The Custom of the Country (1913) and The Age of Innocence (1920), for which she received the Pulitzer Prize in 1921. She also wrote several short stories and even a book about decorating houses.

Ethan Frome (1911) is one of the few pieces of Wharton’s fiction that does not take place in an urban, upper-class setting. Interestingly, Wharton based the narrative of the novel on an accident that occurred in Lenox, Massachusetts, where she traveled extensively and had come into contact with one of the victims of the accident.

Wharton found the notion of the tragic sledding crash to be irresistible as a potential extended metaphor for the wrongdoings of a secret love affair. According to Pierpont, Wharton believed this novella “marked her coming-of-age as a craftsman.”

Settling in Paris in the early 1910s, she became one of many American expatriates who rejected American society and its contradictions. She was concerned with the subtle interplay of emotions on a society that censured the free expression of passion.

In 1937, after nearly half a century of devotion to the art of fiction, Wharton died in her villa near Paris at the age of seventy-five. She remains one of America’s most cherished novelists.