Edith Wharton (1862–1937) was born into an upper-class New York family and was thus ‘expected to be beautiful, elegant and well-dressed, certainly not to think of herself as intelligent, creative or sexual’, as the feminist critic Elaine Showalter notes (Showalter 2009, p. 272). Wharton’s tragic novella Ethan Frome (1911) is unique among her works in being set among the rural working class of New England rather than the aristocratic elite she typically depicted and knew so well.
New England, ‘with its lonely lives in half-deserted…villages, before the coming of the motor and the telephone’, was for Wharton ‘a primal landscape that exposed the harsh face of human existence’, argues Showalter (Showalter 2009, p. 277). Wharton herself saw the ‘snowbound villages of Western Massachusetts’ as ‘still grim places, morally and physically: insanity, incest, and slow mental and moral starvation were hidden away behind the paintless wooden house-fronts of the long village street, or the isolated farmhouses on the neighbouring hills’ (Wharton in Showalter 2009, p. 277). Noting the hold the landscape had on the imagination of another great female novelist, Wharton felt ‘Emily Brontë would have found as savage tragedies in our remoter valleys as in her Yorkshire moors’ (Wharton in Showalter 2009, p. 277).
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