First published in 1911 Ethan Frome is widely regarded as Edith Wharton s most revealing novel and her finest achievement in fiction. Set in the bleak barren winter landscape of New England it is the tragic tale of a simple man bound to the demands of his farm and his tyrannical sickly wife Zeena and driven by his star-crossed love for Zeena s young cousin Mattie Silver. In its spare chilling creation of rural isolation hardscrabble poverty and wintry landscape writes Alfred Kazin in his afterword Ethan Frome overwhelms the reader as a drama of irresistible necessity. An exemplary work of literary realism in setting and character Ethan Frome stands as one of the great classics of twentieth-century American literature.