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A review by hopeloveslit
Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
4.0
Ethan Frome is a melancholic cautionary tale of forbidden love and the anguish it produces. It’s a tragic and unforgettable novel.
I enjoyed innumerable aspects of Ethan Frome but the writing is my favorite part. I wish to bottle up Edith Wharton’s prose and add drops to my morning coffee. I’m obsessed with her evocative imagery, dramatic structures, and simple but elegant diction.
“But at sunset the clouds gathered again, bringing an earlier night, and the snow began to fall straight and steadily from a sky without wind, in a soft universal diffusion more confusing than the gusts and eddies of the morning. It seemed to be a part of the thickening darkness, to be the winter night itself descending on us layer by layer.”
Wharton creates a gloomy ambiance throughout this novel. Set in a small and bleak Massachusetts town, the reader can feel the isolation, yearning, and poverty like humid air. The harsh winters set the novel’s despairful tone and the implied effects on the characters who live through them.
“Guess he’s been in Starkfield too many winters.”
Overall, I can’t recommend this book enough. It’s the perfect story to read on a snowy day. In the future, I’ll be rereading this book during the winter. Wharton’s passages about winter are some of my favorites from Ethan Frome. If you love tragedies and winter, you'll definitely enjoy this book.
"And there were other sensations, less definable but more exquisite, which drew them together with a shock of silent joy: the cold red of sunset behind winter hills, the flight of cloud-flocks over slopes of golden stubble, or the intensely blue shadows of hemlocks on sunlit snow."
I enjoyed innumerable aspects of Ethan Frome but the writing is my favorite part. I wish to bottle up Edith Wharton’s prose and add drops to my morning coffee. I’m obsessed with her evocative imagery, dramatic structures, and simple but elegant diction.
“But at sunset the clouds gathered again, bringing an earlier night, and the snow began to fall straight and steadily from a sky without wind, in a soft universal diffusion more confusing than the gusts and eddies of the morning. It seemed to be a part of the thickening darkness, to be the winter night itself descending on us layer by layer.”
Wharton creates a gloomy ambiance throughout this novel. Set in a small and bleak Massachusetts town, the reader can feel the isolation, yearning, and poverty like humid air. The harsh winters set the novel’s despairful tone and the implied effects on the characters who live through them.
“Guess he’s been in Starkfield too many winters.”
Overall, I can’t recommend this book enough. It’s the perfect story to read on a snowy day. In the future, I’ll be rereading this book during the winter. Wharton’s passages about winter are some of my favorites from Ethan Frome. If you love tragedies and winter, you'll definitely enjoy this book.
"And there were other sensations, less definable but more exquisite, which drew them together with a shock of silent joy: the cold red of sunset behind winter hills, the flight of cloud-flocks over slopes of golden stubble, or the intensely blue shadows of hemlocks on sunlit snow."