So many big anniversaries to celebrate this year it's catching me out a bit. You know when you turn over the page of the diary and there's a birthday you've nearly forgotten...or worse do you stand in the card shop thinking...'January...right..who has a birthday/anniversary/important date in January...' and then I look at the price of cards and decide to go home, sit at the kitchen table and make them myself instead a la cheapskate.com.
But in the literary world I did feel I wanted to mark two birthdays this week, so today it is a happy 150th to Edith Wharton, born this day in 1862, died in 1937, and whilst looking for pictures of her it occurred to me how strange it may have seemed to have dressed like this in your younger days..
to this much more relaxed style in later days...
Can there be any greater shift in fashions for women towards freedom of movement and through any single lifetime than the one Edith Wharton may have experienced in hers, and in that time from 1862 to 1937.
To celebrate our Edith's birthday I have read Ethan Frome for the umpteenth time, and out of my copy fell a 2004 newspaper clipping from a series Book of a Lifetime, in which Anita Shreve credits this book as the start of her life as a writer. Started grudgingly for a school assignment and quickly hooked in Anita Shreve recognised that moment, on reflection, as the beginning of a lifelong addiction to reading
Ethan Frome is my most favourite of winter novellas, whilst in contrast in the summer, rather than choosing the more obvious Summer by Edith Wharton, I may turn to The Awakening by Kate Chopin; neither guaranteed to cheer for subject matter, but for geographical immersion in place and season and mood I'm not sure I can think of better, though I will await your suggestions....perhaps I could do with some new ones??
The sense of place is profound and almost hushed in Ethan Frome as the tragedy plays out and told by an unnamed narrator, an engineer who is piecing the events together when severe weather finds him taking shelter at the Frome farmstead. Edith Wharton tips the reader into the novel via a prolonged ellipsis which looks like this in the book,
It was that night that I found the clue to Ethan Frome, and began to put together this version of his story ................................................................................................................... ....................................................................................................................................
..................................................................................................................................
Edith Wharton apparently fought hard with her publishers Scribner's to keep that extended ellipsis in place, she wanted an important break, immediately apparent to the eye and signifying a flashback of twenty-four years. That said the story is so convincingly told it became easy to forget this was flashback as I shivered to keep warm under the influence of Edith Wharton's wonderful 'snow' writing. An isolated community and a world muffled by some relentless New England weather which seems to intensify with every page ...
'The cold was less sharp than earlier in the day and a thick fleecy sky threatened snow for the morrow. Here and there a star pricked through, showing behind it a deep well of blue. In an hour or two the moon would push up over the ridge behind the farm, burn a gold-edged rent in the clouds, and then be swallowed by them. A mournful peace hung on the fields, as though they felt the relaxing grasp of the cold and stretched themselves in their long winter sleep.'
In the next line Ethan is, for reasons various, 'alert for the jingle of sleighbells' and that's me smitten and there listening and watching with him.
The landscape already offers the potential for some deliciously atmospheric cover designs ...
Poor Ethan, only twenty-eight, ambitions of education and travel thwarted by bereavement and the inheritance of the failing family farm, trapped for the past seven years in a loveless marriage with the older Zeena. Zeena equally trapped, by a state of chronic hypochondria, perhaps better known as hysteria in the nineteenth century but a martyr to her 'troubles'. Into this dull and monotonous arc of misery comes young Mattie Silver, Zeena's orphaned cousin, who is taken in as a maid and whose name perhaps suggests that potential to bring a glimmer of a shine to life... maybe.
Ethan's growing attraction to Mattie, though covert and barely acknowledged between them, does not go unnoticed by the eagle-eyed Zeena and you would not believe the trouble that can be caused by a broken pickle dish. When, after a visit to a distant doctor Zeena returns with news that her 'troubles' have become 'complications', she seizes her chance to oust Mattie from the home to be replaced by a more capable carer, which she will will surely need because when you have 'complications' you 'succumb'.
That resume gives very little away as always, and thus barely gives credence to the flesh that Edith Wharton adds to the bones here and yet, even knowing this story so well, I never cease to be shocked by the ending of Ethan Frome. Perhaps I almost revisit that first reading each time and the sense of growing tension as I realise 'something' is going to happen, and it is unlikely to be good. Hermione Lee, in her probably excellent biography of Edith Wharton, which I still haven't read, suggests that the ending of Ethan Frome is...
'one of the most quietly horrifying moments in all fiction...cruelly effective.'
Repeated readings never dull the impact or dilute the power of that cruelty either, yet on each reading something else glides off the page too, surely the sign of a brilliant book. This time around I felt some shreds of sympathy for Zeena...wondered what a book entitled Zeena Frome might reveal. Why has Zeena resorted to the world of hysteria... what has she been trying to escape from...what is the secondary gain involved...why has she stayed there, and the irony mixed in with the ending is equally powerful. Perhaps that's just me and a heightened sense that when I listen to someone's narrative in the real world I always have to remember I am only hearing one side of the story, yes... it's far too easy to loath Zeena, I'd love to know more.
Henry James applauded Ethan Frome for its 'kept-downess', no mean feat and Hermione Lee highlights the brushstrokes seemingly touched into Edith Wharton's novella that allude to the wintry romance of Keats's The Eve of St Agnes (actually January 20th) so all very seasonal and perhaps Keats offers a perfect note on which to end this post ...
St. Agnes' Eve - Ah, bitter chill it was!
The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;
The hare limp'd trembling through the frozen grass,
And silent was the flock in woolly fold:
Numb were the Beadsman's fingers, while he told
His rosary, and while his frosted breath,
Like pious incense from a censer old,
Seem'd taking flight for heaven, without a death,
Past the sweet Virgin's picture, while his prayer he saith.
Well, almost end, because I need to know...have you all read Ethan Frome ??
And if you haven't and you have an e reader, it is free to download to Kindle or in formats various from girlebooks which I hope those of you with e-readers have all discovered and raided by now... you'll find Ethan Frome here and links to other free books here.
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