Full Description
This amply annotated edition of Wharton's 1911 classic novella includes textual notes and documents, including Wharton's preface, letters, reviews, and early short story, "Mrs. Manstey's View." It is accompanied by the editor's comprehensive introduction and a wide array of readings on topics central to the novella: tragedy, health and fitness, sex and marriage, and turn-of-the-century New England poverty and isolation. Of her twenty-five novels and novellas, Ethan Frome is the one of which Edith Wharton was most proud. Historically viewed as a high society writer or novelist of manners, Wharton is now receiving her due as an astute chronicler and critic of American life who brought literary realism to new levels and helped to usher in a period of modernist innovation.
This Broadview Edition demonstrates that Ethan Frome, a nightmarish saga of thwarted romance, is not an anomaly in Wharton's career, but a natural outgrowth of her interest in the interplay of individual and society.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Edith Wharton: A Brief Chronology
A Note on the Text
Ethan Frome
Appendix A: Writings by Edith Wharton
Introduction to Ethan Frome (1922)
From The Writing of Fiction (1925)
From A Backward Glance (1934)
"Mrs. Manstey's View" (10 July 1891)
Appendix B: Correspondence
Edith Wharton to Elizabeth Frelinghuysen Davis Lodge (20 June [1910])
Edith Wharton to Bernard Berenson (4 January [1911])
Edith Wharton to W. Morton Fullerton (16 October [1911])
Henry James to Edith Wharton (25 October 1911)
Edith Wharton to Charles Scribner (27 November [1911])
Appendix C: Contemporary Reviews and Commentaries
From The New York Times (8 October 1911)
From Outlook (21 October 1911)
From The Nation (26 October 1911)
From The Saturday Review (18 November 1911)
From John Curtis Underwood, "Culture and Edith Wharton" (1914)
From William Lyon Phelps, "The Advance of the English Novel," The Bookman (July 1916)
From Katharine Fullerton Gerould, Edith Wharton: A Critical Study (1922)
From Alfred Kazin, "The Lady and the Tiger," Virginia Quarterly Review (Winter 1941)
From Percy Lubbock, Portrait of Edith Wharton (1947)
Appendix D: Tragedy
From Aristotle, Poetics (335 BCE)
From Arthur Miller, "Tragedy and the Common Man" (1949)
From Richard Sewall, The Vision of Tragedy (1980)
Appendix E: Health and Fitness
From Theodore Roosevelt, "The Strenuous Life" (1902)
From Samuel McComb, "The Power of Suggestion in Nervous Troubles" (May 1908)
From Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on Sexuality (1905) and "The Economic Problem of Masochism" (1924)
From George Kennan, "The Problems of Suicide" (June 1908)
Appendix F: Sex and Marriage
Junius Browne, "Romantic Marriages" (January 1895)
From Mrs. P.T. Barnum, "Moths of Modern Marriage" (March 1891)
From Byron Hall, "A Lesson Conjugal" (1 September 1903)
From William Lee Howard, Facts for the Married (1912)
"Separation the Cure for Matrimonial Woe" (16 January 1905)
From "Felix Adler on Divorce" (26 January 1905)
Appendix G: New England and the Nation
"Lenox High School Girl Dashed to her Death," The Berkshire Evening Eagle (12 March 1904)
"A Sleeping Giant," The Youth's Companion (18 November 1909)
From Rollin Lynde Hartt, "The Regeneration of Rural New England," Outlook (3 March 1900)
From "The Value of Natural Scenery," Outlook (26 September 1908)
Appendix H: Photographs
The Mount, Lenox, Massachusetts (1906)
The Mount, Lenox, Massachusetts (1906)
Edith Wharton (1910)
Wharton's Library, The Mount (undated)
Sledding in Lenox, Massachusetts (1890s)
Cover of Ethan Frome, the Play (1936)
Works Cited and Further Reading
